Translations

These translations are contributed by volunteers. If you would like to help
translate the manual into a different language, or you would like to look at
the translations that are currently in progress, please see the
translating the manual section.

Introduction

Anki is a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it is a lot
more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease
your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn.

Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki.
Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and scientific
markup (via LaTeX), the possibilities are endless. For example:

learning a language

studying for medical and law exams

memorizing people’s names and faces

brushing up on geography

mastering long poems

even practicing guitar chords!

There are two simple concepts behind Anki: active recall testing and spaced
repetition. They are not known to most learners, despite having been written
about in the scientific literature for many years. Understanding how they work
will make you a more effective learner.

Active Recall Testing

Active recall testing means being asked a question and trying to remember
the answer. This is in contrast to passive study, where we read, watch or
listen to something without pausing to consider if we know the answer.
Research has shown that active recall testing is far more effective at
building strong memories than passive study. There are two reasons for this:

The act of recalling something strengthens the memory, increasing the
chances we’ll be able to remember it again.

When we’re unable to answer a question, it tells us we need to return to
the material to review or relearn it.

You have probably encountered active recall testing in your school years
without even realizing it. When good teachers give you a series of questions
to answer after reading an article, or make you take weekly progress-check
tests, they are not doing it simply to see if you understood the material or
not. By testing you, they are increasing the chances you will be able to
remember the material in the future.

A good way to integrate active recall testing into your own studies is to use
flashcards. With traditional paper flashcards, you write a question on one
side of a card, and the answer on the other side. By not turning the card over
until you’ve thought about the answer, you can learn things more
effectively than passive observation allows.

Use It or Lose It

Our brains are efficient machines, and they rapidly discard information that
doesn’t seem useful. Chances are that you don’t remember what you had for
dinner on Monday two weeks ago, because this information is not usually
useful. If you went to a fantastic restaurant that day and spent the last two
weeks telling people about how great it was, however, you’re likely to still
remember in vivid detail.

The brain’s “use it or lose it” policy applies to everything we learn. If you
spend an afternoon memorizing some science terms, and then don’t think about
that material for two weeks, you’ll probably have forgotten most of it. In
fact, studies show we forget about 75% of material learnt within a 48 hour
period. This can seem pretty depressing when you need to learn a lot of
information.

The solution is simple, however: review. By reviewing newly-learnt
information, we can greatly reduce forgetting.

The only problem is that traditionally review was not very practical. If you
are using paper flashcards, it’s easy to flick through all of them if you only
have 30 of them to review, but as the number grows to 300 or 3000, it quickly
becomes unwieldy.

Spaced Repetition

The spacing effect was reported by a German psychologist in 1885. He
observed that we tend to remember things more effectively if we spread reviews
out over time, instead of studying multiple times in one session. Since the
1930s there have been a number of proposals for utilizing the spacing effect
to improve learning, in what has come to be called spaced repetition.

One example is in 1972, when a German scientist called Sebastian Leitner
popularized a method of spaced repetition with paper flashcards. By separating
the paper cards up into a series of boxes, and moving the cards to a different
box on each successful or unsuccessful review, it was possible to see at a
glance a rough estimate of how well a card was known and when it should be
reviewed again. This was a great improvement over a single box of cards, and
it has been widely adopted by computerized flashcard software. It is a rather
rough approach however, as it can’t give you an exact date on which you should
review something again, and it doesn’t cope very well with material of varying
difficulty.

The biggest developments in the last 30 years have come from the authors of
SuperMemo, a commercial flashcard program that implements spaced repetition.
SuperMemo pioneered the concept of a system that keeps track of the ideal time
to review material and optimizes itself based on the performance of
the user.

In SuperMemo’s spaced repetition system, every time you answer a question, you
tell the program how well you were able to remember it – whether you forgot
completely, made a small mistake, remembered with trouble, remembered easily,
etc. The program uses this feedback to decide the optimal time to show you the
question again. Since a memory gets stronger each time you successfully recall
it, the time between reviews gets bigger and bigger – so you may see a
question for the first time, then 3 days later, 15 days later, 45 days later,
and so on.

This was a revolution in learning, as it meant material could be learnt and
retained with the absolute minimum amount of effort necessary. SuperMemo’s
slogan sums it up: with spaced repetition, you can forget about forgetting.

Why Anki?

While there is no denying the huge impact SuperMemo has had on the field, it
is not without its problems. The program is often criticized for being buggy
and difficult to navigate. It only runs on Windows computers. It’s proprietary
software, meaning end-users can’t extend it or access the raw data. And while
very old versions are made available for free, they are quite limited for
modern use.

Anki addresses these issues. There are free clients for Anki available on many
platforms, so struggling students and teachers with budgetary constraints are
not left out. It’s open source, with an already flourishing library of add-ons
contributed by end-users. It’s multi-platform, running on Windows, Mac OSX,
Linux/FreeBSD, and some mobile devices. And it’s considerably easier to use
than SuperMemo.

Internally, Anki’s spaced repetition system is based on an older version of the
SuperMemo algorithm called SM2. Subsequent versions have managed to squeeze out
a little more learning efficiency, but they come at the cost of greatly
increased complexity, and they are more susceptible to scheduling errors in
real-world use. For a more in-depth discussion of this and the differences in
scheduling algorithms, see the appropriate section in the FAQ.

The Basics

Cards

A question and answer pair is called a card. This is based on a paper
flashcard with a question on one side and the answer on the back. In Anki a
card doesn’t actually look like a physical card, and when you show the answer
the question remains visible by default. For example, if you’re studying basic
chemistry, you might see a question like:

Q: Chemical symbol for oxygen?

After thinking about it, and deciding the answer is O, you click the show
answer button, and Anki shows you:

Q: Chemical symbol for oxygen?
A: O

After confirming that you are correct, you can tell Anki how well you
remembered, and Anki will choose a next time to show you again.

Decks

A deck is a group of cards. You can place cards in different decks to study
parts of your card collection instead of studying everything at once. Each
deck can have different settings, such as how many new cards to show each day,
or how long to wait until cards are shown again.

Decks can contain other decks, which allows you to organize decks into a tree.
Anki uses “::” to show different levels. A deck called “Chinese::Hanzi” refers
to a “Hanzi” deck, which is part of a “Chinese” deck. If you select “Hanzi”
then only the Hanzi cards will be shown; if you select “Chinese” then all
Chinese cards, including Hanzi cards, will be shown.

To place decks into a tree, you can either name them with “::” between each
level, or drag and drop them from the deck list. Decks that have been nested
under another deck (that is, that have at least one “::” in their names) are
often called subdecks, and top-level decks are sometimes called superdecks
or parent decks.

Anki starts with a deck called “default”; any cards which have somehow become
separated from other decks will go here. Anki will hide the default deck if it
contains no cards and you have added other decks. Alternatively, you may rename
this deck and use it for other cards.

Decks are best used to hold broad categories of cards, rather than specific
topics such as “food verbs” or “lesson 1”. For more info on this, please see
the using decks appropriately section.

For information on how decks affect the order cards are displayed in, please
see the display order section.

Notes & Fields

When making flashcards, it’s often desirable to make more than one card that
relates to some information. For example, if you’re learning French, and you
learn that the word “bonjour” means “hello”, you may wish to create one card
that shows you “bonjour” and asks you to remember “hello”, and another card
that shows you “hello” and asks you to remember “bonjour”. One card is testing
your ability to recognize the foreign word, and the other card is testing your
ability to produce it.

When using paper flashcards, your only option in this case is to write out the
information twice, once for each card. Some computer flashcard programs make
life easier by providing a feature to flip the front and back sides. This is
an improvement over the paper situation, but there are two major downsides:

Because such programs don’t track your performance of recognition and
production separately, cards will tend not to be shown to you at the optimum
time, meaning you forget more than you’d like, or you study more than is
necessary.

Reversing the question and answer only works when you want exactly the same
content on each side. This means it’s not possible to display extra info on the
back of each card for example.

Anki solves these problems by allowing you to split the content of your cards
up into separate pieces of information. You can then tell Anki which pieces of
information you want on each card, and Anki will take care of creating the
cards for you and updating them if you make any edits in the future.

Imagine we want to study French vocabulary, and we want to include the page
number on the back of each card. We want our cards to look like this:

Q: Bonjour
A: Hello
Page #12

And:

Q: Hello
A: Bonjour
Page #12

In this example, we have three pieces of related information: a French word,
an English meaning, and a page number. If we put them together, they’d look
like this:

French: Bonjour
English: Hello
Page: 12

In Anki, this related information is called a note, and each piece of
information is called a field. So we can say that this type of note has
three fields: French, English, and Page.

To add and edit fields, click the “Fields…” button while adding or editing
notes. For more information on fields, please see the Customizing Fields section.

Card Types

In order for Anki to create cards based on our notes, we need to give it a
blueprint that says which fields should be displayed on the front or back of
each card. This blueprint is called a card type. Each type of note can have
one or more card types; when you add a note, Anki will create one card for each
card type.

Each card type has two templates, one for the question and one for the
answer. In the above French example, we wanted the recognition card to look
like this:

Q: Bonjour
A: Hello
Page #12

To do this, we can set the question and answer templates to:

Q: {{French}}
A: {{English}}<br>
Page #{{Page}}

By surrounding a field name in double curly brackets, we tell Anki to replace
that section with the actual information in the field. Anything not surrounded
by curly brackets remains the same on each card. (For instance, we don’t have
to type “Page #” into the Page field when adding material – it’s added
automatically to every card.) <br> is a special code that tells Anki to move to
the next line; more details are available in the templates
section.

The production card templates work in a similar way:

Q: {{English}}
A: {{French}}<br>
Page #{{Page}}

Once a card type has been created, every time you add a new note, a card will
be created based on that card type. Card types make it easy to keep the
formatting of your cards consistent and can greatly reduce the amount of effort
involved in adding information. They also mean Anki can ensure related cards
don’t appear too close to each other, and they allow you to fix a typing
mistake or factual error once and have all the related cards updated at once.

To add and edit card types, click the “Cards…” button while adding or editing
notes. For more information on card types, please see the Cards and Templates section.

Note Types

Anki allows you to create different types of notes for different material. Each
type of note has its own set of fields and card types. It’s a good idea to
create a separate note type for each broad topic you’re studying. In the above
French example, we might create a note type called “French” for that. If we
wanted to learn capital cities, we could create a separate note type for that
as well, with fields such as “Country” and “Capital City”.

When Anki checks for duplicates, it only compares other notes of the same
type. Thus if you add a capital city called “Orange” using the capital city
note type, you won’t see a duplicate message when it comes time to learn how
to say “orange” in French.

When you create a new collection, Anki automatically adds some standard note
types to it. These note types are provided to make Anki easier for new users,
but in the long run it’s recommended you define your own note types for the
content you are learning. The standard note types are as follows:

Basic

Has Front and Back fields, and will create one card. Text you enter
in Front will appear on the front of the card, and text you enter in Back will
appear on the back of the card.

Basic (and reversed card)

Like Basic, but creates two cards for the text
you enter: one from front→back and one from back→front.

Basic (optional reversed card)

This is a front→back card, and optionally a
back→front card. To do this, it has a third field called “Add Reverse.” If
you enter any text into that field, a reverse card will be created. More
information about this is available in the Cards and Templates
section.

Cloze

A note type which makes it easy to select text and turn it into a
cloze deletion (e.g., “Man landed on the moon in […]” → “Man landed on the
moon in 1969”). More information is available in the cloze deletion
section.

To add your own note types and modify existing ones, you can use Tools → Manage
Note Types from the main Anki window.

Note

Notes and note types are common to your whole collection rather than
limited to an individual deck. This means you can use many different types of
notes in a particular deck, or have different cards generated from a particular
note in different decks. When you add notes using the Add window, you can
select what note type to use and what deck to use, and these choices are
completely independent of each other. You can also change the note type of some
notes after you’ve already created them.

Adding Material

Downloading Shared Decks

The easiest way to get started with Anki is to download a deck of cards
someone has shared:

Click the “Get Shared” button at the bottom of the deck list.

When you’ve found a deck you’re interested in, click the “Download” button
to download a deck package.

Double-click on the downloaded package to load it into Anki, or
File→Import it.

Please note that it’s not currently possible to add shared decks directly to
your AnkiWeb account. You need to import them with the desktop program, then
synchronize to upload them to AnkiWeb.

Please see sharing decks for info on sharing your own decks with
others.

Self-made versus pre-made

Creating your own deck is the most effective way to learn a complex subject.
Subjects like languages and the sciences can’t be understood simply by
memorizing facts — they require explanation and context to learn effectively.
Furthermore, inputting the information yourself forces you to decide what the
key points are, leading to a better understanding.

If you are a language learner, you may be tempted to download a long list of
words and their translations, but this won’t teach you a language any more
than memorizing scientific equations will teach you astrophysics. To learn
properly, you need textbooks, teachers, or exposure to real-world sentences.

Do not learn if you do not understand.
--SuperMemo

Most shared decks are created by people who are learning material outside of
Anki – from textbooks, classes, TV, etc. They select the interesting points
from what they learn and put them into Anki. They make no effort to add
background information or explanations to the cards, because they already
understand the material. So when someone else downloads their deck and tries
to use it, they’ll find it very difficult as the background information and
explanations are missing.

That is not to say shared decks are useless – simply that for complex
subjects, they should be used as a supplement to external material, not as a
replacement for it. If you’re studying textbook ABC and someone has shared a
deck of ideas from ABC, that’s a great way to save some time. And for simple
subjects that are basically a list of facts, such as capital city names or pub
quiz trivia, you probably don’t need external material. But if you attempt to
study complex subjects without external material, you will probably meet with
disappointing results.

Adding Cards and Notes

Recall from the basics that in Anki we add notes rather than cards,
and Anki creates cards for us. Click Add in the main window, and the Add
Notes window will appear.

The top left of the window shows us the current note type. If it does
not say “Basic,” then you may have added some note types when you downloaded a
shared deck. The text below assumes that “Basic” is selected.

The top right of the window shows us the deck cards will be added to. If you’d
like to add cards to a new deck, you can click on the deck name button and
then click “Add”.

Below the note type, you’ll see some buttons, and an area labeled “Front” and
“Back”. Front and Back are called fields, and you can add, remove and
rename them by clicking the “Fields…” button above.

Below the fields is another area labelled “Tags”. Tags are labels that you can
attach to your notes, to make organizing and finding notes easier. You can
leave the tags blank if you wish, or add one or more of them. Tags are
separated by a space. If the tags area says

vocab check_with_tutor

…then the note you add would have two tags.

When you’ve entered text into the front and back, you can click the “Add”
button or press Ctrl+Enter (Command+Enter on a Mac) to add the note to your
collection. When you do so, a card will be created as well, and placed into the
deck you chose. If you’d like to edit a card you added, you can click the
history button to search for a recently added card in the browser.

Anki checks the first field for uniqueness, so it will warn you if you enter
two cards with a Front field of “apple” (for example). The uniqueness check is
limited to the current note type, so if you’re studying multiple languages, two
cards with the same Front would not be listed as duplicates as long as you had
a different note type for each language.

Anki doesn’t check for duplicates in other fields automatically for efficiency
reasons, but the browser has a “Find Duplicates” function which you can run
periodically.

For more information on the buttons between the note type and the fields,
please see the editor section.

Best Practices

Different people like to review in different ways, but there are some general
concepts to keep in mind. An excellent introduction is
this article on the
SuperMemo site. In particular:

Keep it simple: The shorter your cards, the easier they are to review. You
may be tempted to include lots of information “just in case,” but reviews
will quickly become painful.

Don’t memorize without understanding: If you’re studying a language, try
to avoid large lists of words. The best way to learn languages is in
context, which means seeing those words used in a sentence. Likewise,
imagine you’re studying a computer course. If you attempt to memorize the
mountain of acronyms, you’ll find it very difficult to make progress. But
if you take the time to understand the concepts behind the acronyms,
learning the acronyms will become a lot easier.

Adding a Note Type

While basic note types are sufficient for simple cards with only a word or
phrase on each side, as soon as you find yourself wanting to include more than
one piece of information on the front or back, it’s better to split that
information up into more fields.

You may find yourself thinking "but I only want one card, so why can’t I just
include the audio, a picture, a hint and the translation in the Front field?"
If you’d prefer to do that, that’s fine. But the disadvantage of that approach
is that all the information is stuck together. If you wanted to sort your
cards by the hint, you wouldn’t be able to do that as it’s mixed in with the
other content. You also wouldn’t be able to do things like move the audio from
the front to the back, except by laboriously copying and pasting it for every
note. By keeping content in separate fields, you make it much easier to adjust
the layout of your cards in the future.

To create a new type of note, choose Tools → Manage Note Types from the main
Anki window. Then click “Add” to add a new type of note. You’ll now see
another screen that gives you a choice of note types to base the new type on.
“Add” means to base the newly created type on one that comes with Anki.
“Clone” means to base the newly created type on one that is already in your
collection. For instance, if you’d created a French vocab type already, you
might want to clone that when creating a German vocab type.

After choosing OK, you’ll be asked to name the new type. The subject material
you’re studying is a good choice here – things like “Japanese”, ”Trivia”, and
so on. Once you’ve chosen a name, close the Note Types window, and you’ll
return to the adding window.

Customizing Fields

To customize fields, click the “Fields…” button when adding or editing a
note, or while the note type is selected in the Manage Note Types window.

You can add, remove, or rename fields by clicking the appropriate buttons. To
change the order in which the fields appear in this dialog and the add notes
dialog, you can use the reposition button, which asks for the numerical
position you want the field to have. So if you want to change a field to be the
new first field, enter “1”.

Note

Do not use Tags, Type, Deck, Card, or FrontSide as field names,
as they are special fields and will not work properly.

The options at the bottom of the screen allow you to edit various properties of
the fields to be used when adding and editing the cards. This is not where you
customize what appears on your cards when reviewing; for that, please see
templates.

Editing Font allows you to customize the font and size used when editing
notes. This is useful if you want to make unimportant information smaller, or
increase the size of foreign characters which are hard to read. The changes you
make here do not affect how cards appear when reviewing: to do that, please see
the templates section. If you have enabled the “type in the
answer” function, however, the text you type will use the font size defined
here. (For information about how to change the actual font face when typing the
answer, please see the checking your answer section.)

Sort by this field… tells Anki to show this field in the Sort Field column
of the browser. You can use this to sort cards by that field. Only one field
can be the sort field at once.

When Remember last input… is checked, Anki will not clear out this field’s
content after a note is added. If you find yourself entering the same content
into multiple notes, you may find this useful.

Reverse text direction is useful if you are studying languages that display
text from right to left (RTL), such as Arabic or Hebrew. This setting
currently only controls editing; to make sure the text displays correctly
during review, you’ll need to adjust your template.

After you’ve added fields, you’ll probably want to add them to the front or
back of your cards. For more information on that, please see the
templates section.

Changing Deck / Note Type

While adding, you can click on the top left button to change note type, and
the top right button to change deck. The window that opens up will not only
allow you to select a deck or note type, but also to add new decks or manage
your note types.

Using Decks Appropriately

Decks are designed to divide your content up into broad categories
that you wish to study separately, such as English, Geography, and so on. You
may be tempted to create lots of little decks to keep your content organized,
such as “my geography book chapter 1”, or “food verbs”, but this is not
recommended, for the following reasons:

Lots of little decks mean you end up reviewing cards in a recognizable order.
Whether it’s because you’re clicking on each deck in turn (which is slow)
or you’ve added a number of decks under a single parent deck, you’ll end up
seeing all the “chapter 1” or “food verb” cards together. This makes it
easier to answer the cards, as you can guess them from the context, which
leads to weaker memories. When you need to recall the word or phrase outside
Anki, you won’t have the luxury of being shown related content first!

Anki was not designed to handle many decks (more than several dozen), and
it will slow down as you add more – especially if you’re studying on a mobile
client. A few extra decks is not going to make a noticeable difference, but
if you have many decks the delays will start to add up.

Instead of creating lots of little decks, it’s a better idea to use tags and/or
fields to classify your content. Instead of creating a “food verbs” decks for
example, you could add those cards to your main language study deck, and tag
the cards with “food” and “verb”. Each card can have multiple tags, which means
you can do things like search for all verbs, or all food-related vocabulary,
or all verbs that are related to food.

For those who like to stay very organized, you can add fields to your notes
to classify your content, such as “book”, “page”, and so on. Anki supports
searching in specific fields, which means you can do a search for
“book:'my book' page:63” and immediately find what you’re looking for.

Anki’s custom study and filtered deck features make this
especially powerful, as you can create temporary decks out of search terms.
This allows you to review your content mixed together in a single deck most of
the time (for optimum memory), but also create temporary decks when you need to
focus on particular material, such as before a test. The general rule is that
if you always want to be able to study some content separately, it should be in
a normal deck, and if you only occasionally need to be able to study it
separately (for a test, when under a backlog, etc), tags/fields and filtered
decks are better.

Studying

When you have found a deck you like or entered some notes in, it’s time to
start studying.

Decks

Study in Anki is limited to the currently selected deck as well as any
subdecks it contains.

On the decks screen, your decks will be displayed in a list. There are two
number columns, due and new. Due is the count of waiting reviews and
cards currently in learning. New is the number of new cards that are ready to
be learnt that day.

When you click on a deck, it will become the current deck, and Anki will
change to the study screen. You can return to the deck list to change the
currently selected deck at any time by clicking on “Decks” at the top of the
main window. (You can also use the Study Deck feature to select a
new deck from the keyboard, or you can press the ‘s’ key to study the currently
selected deck.)

You can click the gears button to the right of a deck to rename or delete a
deck, change its options, or export it.

Study Overview

After clicking on a deck to study, you’ll see a screen that shows you how many
cards are due today. This is called the deck overview screen. The cards are
split into three types:

New refers to cards that you have downloaded or entered in, but have
never been studied before.

Learning refers to cards that were seen for the first time recently,
and are still being learnt.

To Review refers to cards that were previously learnt, and now need to be
reviewed so you don’t forget them.

To start a study session, click the Study Now button. Anki will proceed to
show you cards until the cards to be shown for the day have run out.

While studying, you can return to the overview by pressing the “s” key on your
keyboard.

Questions

When a card is shown, only the question is shown at first. After thinking about
the answer, either click the Show Answer button, or press the spacebar. The
answer will then be shown. It’s okay if it takes you a little while to recall
the answer, but as a general rule if you can’t answer within about 10 seconds,
it’s probably better to give up and show the answer than keep struggling to
remember.

When the answer is shown, you should compare the answer you thought of with the
answer which is shown and tell Anki how well you remembered. If you don’t trust
yourself to compare your answer accurately, you can ask Anki to
prompt you to type in the answer rather than just showing it
to you.

The number of buttons available for grading depends on whether the card is
being learnt or reviewed.

Learning

When learning new cards, or when relearning cards that you have forgotten, Anki
will show you the cards one or more times to help you memorize them. Each time
is called a learning step. By default there are two steps: 1 minute and 10
minutes. You can change the number of steps and the delays between them in the
deck options.

There are three rating buttons when learning:

Again moves the card back to the first step.

Good moves the card to the next step. If the card was on the final step, the
card is converted into a review card (it graduates). By default, once the
card has reached the end of the learning steps, the card will be shown again
the next day, then at increasingly long delays (see the next section).

Easy immediately converts the card into a review card, even if there were
steps remaining. By default, the card will be shown again 4 days later, and
then at increasingly long delays. The easy button will not be shown if you are
in relearning mode and it would give the same interval as “good.”

When cards are seen for the first time, they start at step one. This means
answering Good on a card for the first time will show it one more time in 10
minutes, and the initial 1 minute step will be skipped. If you push Again,
though, the card will come back in 1 minute.

You can use the 1, 2 and 3 keys on your keyboard to select a particular
button, where 1 is Again. Pressing the spacebar will select Good.

If there are no other cards to show you, Anki will show learning cards again
even if their delay has not elapsed completely. If you’d prefer to wait the
full learning delay, you can change this behaviour in the
preferences.

Reviewing

When a card has been previously learnt and is ready to be reviewed again,
there are four buttons to rate your answer:

Again marks your answer as incorrect and asks Anki to show the card more
frequently in the future. The card is said to have lapsed. Please see the
lapses section for more information about how lapsed reviews are
handled.

Hard shows the card at a slightly longer delay than last time, and tells
Anki to show the card more frequently in the future.

Good tells Anki that the last delay was about right, and the card easiness
doesn’t need to be adjusted down or up. At the default starting easiness, the
card will be shown again approximately 2 1/2 times longer than the previous
time, so if you had waited 10 days to see the card previously, the next delay
would be about 25 days.

Easy tells Anki you found the delay too short. The card will be
scheduled further into the future than Good, and Anki will schedule the card
less frequently in the future. Because Easy rapidly increases
the delay, it’s best used for only the easiest of cards. Usually you should
find yourself answering Good instead.

As with learning cards, you can use 1-4 on the keyboard to select an answer.
Pressing the spacebar will select Good.

Due Counts and Time Estimates

When only the question is shown, Anki shows three numbers like 12 + 34 + 56 at
the bottom of the screen. These represent the new cards, cards in learning, and
cards to review. If you’d prefer not to see the numbers, you can turn them off
in Anki’s preferences.

Note

The numbers count reviews needed to finish all the cards in that queue,
not the number of cards. If you have multiple steps configured for lapsed
cards, the number will increase by more than one when you fail a card, since
that card needs to be shown several times.

When the answer is shown, Anki shows an estimate of the next time a card will
be shown above each button. If you’d prefer not to see the estimates, you can
disable them in Anki’s preferences.

Note

Anki additionally adds a small amount of random variation to the next due
times, in order to prevent cards that were introduced together and always rated
the same from always staying next to each other. This variation is not shown on
the time estimates but will be applied after selecting the button.

Editing and More

You can click the Edit button in the bottom left to edit the current note.
When you finish editing, you’ll be returned to study. The editing screen works
very similarly to the add notes screen.

At the bottom right of the review screen is a button labeled More. This
button provides some other operations you can do on the current card or note:

Mark Note

Adds a “marked” tag to the current note, so it can be easily found in the
browser. This is useful when you want to take some action on the note at a
later date, such as looking up a word when you get home. Marked cards also
show a small star in the upper-right-hand corner during reviews.

Bury Card / Note

Hides a card or all of the note’s cards from review until the next day. (If
you want to unbury cards before then, you can click the “unbury” button on
the deck overview screen.) This is useful if you cannot
answer the card at the moment or you want to come back to it another time.
Burying can also happen automatically for cards of the same
note. If cards were in learning when they are buried, they are moved back to
the new card queue or review queue prior to being buried.

Suspend Card / Note

Hides a card or all of the note’s cards from review until they are manually
unsuspended (by clicking the suspend button in the browser). This is useful if
you want to avoid reviewing the note for some time, but don’t want to delete
it. If cards were in learning when they are suspended, they are moved back
to the new card queue or review queue prior to being suspended.

Delete Note

Deletes the note and all of its cards.

Options

Edit the options for the current deck.

Replay Audio

If the card has audio on the front or back, play it again.

Record Own Voice

Record from your microphone for the purposes of checking your pronunciation.
This recording is temporary and will go away when you move to the next card.
If you want to add audio to a card permanently, you can do that in the edit
window.

Replay Own Voice

Replay the previous recording of your voice (presumably after showing the
answer).

Display Order

Studying will show cards from the selected deck and any decks it contains.
Thus, if you select your “French” deck, the subdecks “French::Vocab” and
“French::My Textbook::Lesson 1” will be shown as well.

For new cards and reviews, Anki fetches cards from the decks in alphabetical
order. So in the above example, you would get cards first from “French”, then
“My Textbook”, and finally “Vocab”. You can use this to control the order cards
appear in, placing high priority cards in decks that appear higher in the list.
When computers sort text alphabetically, the “-” character comes before
alphabetical characters, and “~” comes after them. So you could call the deck
“-Vocab” to make them appear first, and you could call the other deck “~My
Textbook” to force it to appear after everything else.

New cards and reviews are fetched separately, and Anki won’t wait until both
queues are empty before moving on to the next deck, so it’s possible you’ll
be exposed to new cards one deck while seeing reviews from another deck, or
vice versa. If you don’t want this, click directly on the deck you want to
study instead of one of the parent decks.

Since cards in learning are somewhat time-critical, they are fetched from all
decks at once and shown in the order they are due.

To control the order reviews from a given deck appear in, or change new cards
from ordered to random order, please see the deck options. For
more fine-grained ordering of new cards, you can change the order in the
browser.

Siblings and Burying

Recall from the basics that Anki can create more than one card for
each thing you input, such as a front→back card and a back→front card, or two
different cloze deletions from the same text. These related cards are called
siblings. Anki tries to ensure siblings are not shown close together, as
that’s usually not helpful.

When you answer a card that has siblings, Anki prevents the card’s siblings
from being shown in the same session by automatically burying them. Buried
cards are hidden from review until the clock rolls over to a new day or you
manually unbury them using the “Unbury” button that’s visible at the bottom of
the deck overview screen. Anki will bury siblings even if the
siblings are not in the same deck (for instance, if you use the
deck override feature).

Anki will only bury siblings that are new or review cards. It will not hide
cards in learning, as time is of the essence for those cards. On the other
hand, when you study a learning card, any new/review siblings will be buried.

If you want to see more than one card of a note per day when learning or
reviewing cards, you can stop Anki from burying cards in the deck options.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Most of the common operations in Anki have keyboard shortcuts. Most of them
are discoverable in the interface: menu items list their shortcuts next to
them, and hovering the mouse cursor over a button will generally show its
shortcut in a tooltip.

When studying, either space or enter will show the answer. When the answer is
shown, you can use space or enter to select the Good button. You can use the
1-4 keys to select a specific ease button. Many people find it convenient to
answer most cards with space and keep one finger on 1 for when they forget.

The "Study Deck" item in the Tools menu allows you to quickly
switch to a deck with the keyboard. You can trigger it with the / key. When
opened, it will display all of your decks and show a filter area at the top.
As you type characters, Anki will display only decks matching the characters
you type. You can add a space to separate multiple search terms, and Anki will
show only decks that match all the terms. So “ja 1” or “on1 ja” would both
match a deck called “Japanese::Lesson1”.

Falling Behind

If you fall behind in your reviews, Anki will prioritize cards that have been
waiting the longest. It does this by taking the 200 cards that have been
waiting the longest and showing them to you in a random order up until your
daily review limit. This ordering ensures that no cards will be left waiting
indefinitely, but it means that if you introduce new cards, their reviews won’t
appear until you’ve gotten through your backlog.

If you wish to change the order of the overdue reviews, you can do so by
creating a filtered deck.

When you answer cards that have been waiting for a while, Anki factors in that
delay when determining the next time a card should be shown. Please see the
section on Anki’s spaced-repetition algorithm for more
information.

Editing

Features

On the top left are two buttons, which open the fields and
cards windows.

On the right are buttons that control formatting. Bold, italic and underline
work like they do in a word processing program. The next two buttons allow you to
subscript or superscript text, which is useful for chemical compounds like
H2O or simple math equations like x2.

The icon with the red X clears any formatting in the currently selected text.
This includes colours, bold, etc.

The next button allows you to change text colour.

You can use the paperclip button to select audio, images and videos from your
computer’s hard drive to attach to your notes. Alternatively, you can copy the
media onto your computer’s clipboard (for instance, by right-clicking an image
on the web and choosing Copy Image) and paste it into the field that you want
to place it in. For more information about media, please see the
media section.

The red circle button allows you to record from your computer’s microphone and
attach the recording to the note.

The last button allows you to add advanced mathematical markup called
LaTeX to your notes or edit the underlying formatting.

Most of the buttons have shortcut keys. You can hover the mouse cursor over a
button to see its shortcut. For the LaTeX/HTML menu, use Ctrl+t, then t, e
or m to select the three LaTeX types, and Ctrl+Shift+x to edit the HTML.

Cloze Deletion

Cloze deletion is the process of hiding one or more words in a sentence. For
example, if you have the sentence:

Canberra was founded in 1913.

…and you create a cloze deletion on “1913”, then the sentence would become:

Canberra was founded in [...].

Sometimes sections that have been removed in this fashion are said to be
occluded.

For more information on why you might want to use cloze deletion, see rule
number 5 here.

Anki provides a special cloze deletion type of note, to make creating clozes
easy. To create a cloze deletion note, select the Cloze note type, and type
some text into the "Text" field. Then drag the mouse over the text you want to
hide to select it, and click the […] button. Anki will replace the text
with:

Canberra was founded in {{c1::1913}}.

The “c1” part means that you’ve created one cloze deletion on the sentence.
You can create more than one deletion if you’d like. For example, if you
select Canberra and click […] again, the text will now look like:

{{c2::Canberra}} was founded in {{c1::1913}}.

When you add the above note, Anki will create two cards. The first card will
show:

Canberra was founded in [...].

…on the question, with the full sentence on the answer. The other card will
have the following on the question:

[...] was founded in 1913.

You can also elide multiple sections on the same card. In the above example, if
you change c2 to c1, only one card would be created, with both Canberra and
1913 hidden. If you hold down alt (option on a Mac) while creating a cloze,
Anki will automatically use the same number instead of incrementing it.

Cloze deletions don’t need to fall on word boundaries, so if you select
“anberra” rather than “Canberra” in the above example, the question would
appear as “C[…] was founded in 1913”, giving you a hint.

You can also give yourself hints that don’t match the text. If you replace the
original sentence with:

Canberra::city was founded in 1913

…and then press […] after selecting "Canberra::city", Anki will treat the
text after the two colons as a hint, changing the text into:

{{c1::Canberra::city}} was founded in 1913

When the card comes up for review, it will appear as:

[city] was founded in 1913.

For information on testing your ability to type in a cloze deletion correctly,
please see the section on typing answers.

Please note that overlapping clozes are not supported. For example, the
following field is invalid:

{{c1::Canberra was {{c2::founded}}}} in 1913

If you need to create clozes from overlapping text, add another Text field to
your cloze, add it to the template, and then when creating
notes, paste the text into two separate fields, like so:

Text1 field: {{c1::Canberra was founded}} in 1913
Text2 field: {{c2::Canberra}} was founded in 1913

The default cloze note type has a second field called Extra, that is shown on
the answer side of each card. It can be used for adding some usage notes or
extra information.

The cloze note type is treated specially by Anki, and cannot be created based
on a regular note type. If you wish to customize it, please make sure to clone
the existing Cloze type instead of another type of note.

Inputting Foreign Characters and Accents

All modern computers have built in support for typing
accents and foreign characters, and multiple ways to go
about it. The method we recommend is using a keyboard layout
for the language you want to learn.

Languages with a separate script like Japanese, Chinese,
Thai and so on have their own layouts specifically for that
language.

European languages that use accents may have their own
layout, but can often by typed on a generic "international
keyboard" layout. These work by typing the accent, then the
character you want accented - eg an apostrophe (') then the
letter a (a) gives á.

Keyboards for a specific language are added in a similar
way, but we can not cover them all here. For more
information, please try searching Google for "input Japanese
on a mac", "type Chinese on Windows 10", and so on.

If you’re learning a right to left language, there are lots
of other things to consider. Please see
this
page for more information.

Note

The toolkit Anki is built on has trouble dealing with
a few input methods, such as holding down keys to select
accented characters on Mac OS X, and typing characters by
holding down the alt key and typing a numeric code on
Windows.

Cards and Templates

As mentioned in the basics section, Anki creates cards
automatically, based on the notes you add. (Please read the basics section if
you have not done so already, as the rest of this section assumes that you have
read it.)

You can configure the cards Anki should create and what should be shown on them
when adding or editing material by clicking on the “Cards…” button. At the
top of the window you’ll see a set of tabs, one for each card type. You can
click the plus on the right if you’d like to add another card type to the
current note type. Similarly, if you’d like to delete one, you can do so by
clicking the X on the tab.

On the top left is the front template, on the bottom left is the back
template, and in between them is the card styling section.

In Anki, templates are written in HTML, which is the language that web pages
are written in. The styling section is CSS, which is the language used for
styling web pages.

On the right is a preview of the front and back of the currently selected card.
If you opened the window while adding notes, the preview will be based on the
text you had typed into the Add Notes window. If you opened the window while
editing a note, the preview will be based on the content of that note. If you
opened the window from Tools → Manage Note Types, Anki will display each
field’s name in parentheses in place of content.

At the bottom of the window is a More button that gives you options to rename
or reorder the cards, as well as the following two options:

The Deck Override option allows you to change the deck that cards generated
from the current card type will be placed into. By default, cards are placed
into the deck you provide in the Add Notes window. If you set a deck here, that
card type will be placed into the deck you specified, instead of the deck
listed in the Add Notes window. This can be useful if you want to separate cards
into different decks (for instance, when studying a language, to put production
cards in one deck and recognition cards in another). You can check which deck
the cards are currently going to by choosing Deck Override again.

The Browser Appearance option allows you to set different (perhaps simplified)
templates for display in the Question and Answer columns of the browser; see
browser appearance for more information.

Reverse Cards

If you want to create cards that go in both directions (e.g., both
“ookii”→“big” and “big”→“ookii”), you have several options. The simplest is
to select the “Basic (and reversed card)” built-in note type. This will
generate two cards, one in each direction.

If you want to generate reverse cards for only some of your material (perhaps
you only want to take the time to study reverses for the most important
material, or some of your cards don’t make sense reversed), you can select the
“Basic (optional reversed card)” note type. This note type generates a
forward-only card when you fill in only the first two fields; if you
additionally enter something in the “Add Reverse” field (like a y), Anki will
generate a reverse card as well. The contents of this field will never be
displayed on a card.

If you later decide you don’t want a reverse card that you added, you can
delete it by removing the text from the “Add Reverse” field. Similarly, if you
want to add a reverse card, you can add text to the “Add Reverse” field. If you
didn’t select the optional reverse note type to begin with, you can use Edit →
Change Note Type in the browser to change it.

Note

To avoid loss of scheduling information if you make an editing mistake,
Anki does not automatically delete cards after you remove the text from the
“add reverse” field. To complete the deletion, run Tools → Empty Cards from the
main window.

If you’re using a more complex note type (for instance, one with three cards)
and you wish to generate specific cards only in certain situations, please see
the conditional replacement section.

Basic Templates

The most basic template looks something like this:

{{Front}}

When you place text within curly brackets, Anki looks for a field by that
name, and replaces the text with the actual content of the field. You can
include as many fields as you wish.

Note

Field names are case sensitive. If you have a field named Front,
writing {{front}} will not work properly.

Your templates are not limited to a list of fields. You can also include
arbitrary text on your templates. For example, if you’re studying capital
cities, and you’ve created a note type with a “Country” field, you might
create a front template like this:

What's the capital city of {{Country}}?

The default back template will look something like this:

{{FrontSide}}
<hr id=answer>
{{Back}}

This means “show me the text that’s on the front side, then a divider line, and
then the Back field”.

The id=answer part tells Anki where the divider is between the question and
the answer. This allows Anki to automatically scroll to the spot where the
answer starts when you press show answer on a long card (especially useful on
mobile devices with small screens). If you don’t want a horizontal line at the
beginning of the answer, you can use another HTML element such as a paragraph
or div instead.

Checking Your Answer

If you’d like to type in the answer and have Anki compare your input to the
real answer, you can do so by changing your template. Imagine your front
and back templates look like:

{{Native Word}}

{{FrontSide}}
<hr id=answer>
{{Foreign Word}}

To type in the foreign word and check if you are correct, you need to edit
your front template so that it looks like this:

{{Native Word}}
{{type:Foreign Word}}

Note that we have added type: in front of the field we want to compare. Since
FrontSide is on the back of the card, the type answer box will appear on the
back as well. (If you don’t have FrontSide on the back of your card, you will
need to add the type directive to the answer side as well.)

When reviewing, Anki will display a text box where you can type in the answer,
and upon hitting enter or showing the answer, Anki will show you which parts
you got right and which parts you got wrong. The text box’s font size will be
the size you configured for that field (via the “Fields” button when editing).

This feature does not change how the cards are answered, so it’s still up to
you to decide how well you remembered or not.

Note

Only one typing comparison can be used on a card. If you add the above
text multiple times, it will not work. It also only supports a single line, so
it is not useful for comparing against a field that is comprised on multiple
lines.

Anki uses a monospaced font for the answer comparison so that the “provided”
and “correct” sections line up. If you wish to override the font, you can put
the following at the bottom of your styling section:

code#typeans { font-family: "myfontname"; }

Advanced users can override the default type-answer colours with the css
classes typeGood, typeBad and typeMissed. At the time of writing, only
the computer version of Anki supports these classes.

It is also possible to type in the answer for cloze deletion cards. To do this,
add {{type:cloze:Text}} to both the front and back template, so the back looks
something like this:

{{cloze:Text}}
{{type:cloze:Text}}
{{Extra}}

Note that since the cloze type does not use FrontSide, this must be added to
both sides on a cloze note type.

If there are multiple sections elided, you can separate the answers in the text
box with a comma.

Note

Type answer boxes will not appear in the "preview" dialog in the browser. When you review or look at the preview in the card
types window, they will display.

Newlines

The template language needs a special command to create a new line. For
example, if you wrote the following in the template:

one
two

In the preview, you’d actually see:

one two

To add a new line, you need to add a <br> code to the end of a line, like so:

one<br>
two

The br code stands for "(line) br(eak)".

The same applies for fields. If you want to display two fields, one on each
line, you would use

Card Styling

In between the front and back template is the card styling. Here you can change
the background colour of the card, the default font, the text alignment, and so
on.

Note

This is not where you change the font for type answer
comparisons, type answer textboxes, or editing textboxes; to learn how to
change these fonts, please see the checking your answer and
customizing fields sections.

The standard options available to you are:

font-family

The name of the font to use on the card. If your font has spaces in it like
"MS Unicode", then you need to surround the font name in double quotes as in
this sentence. It is also possible to use multiple fonts on one card; for
information on that, please see below.

font-size

The size of the font in pixels. When changing it, make sure you leave px at
the end.

text-align

Whether the text should be aligned in the center, left, or right.

color

The color of the text. Simple color names like blue, lightyellow, and so
on will work, or you can use HTML color codes to select arbitrary colors.
Please see this webpage for more information.

background-color

The color of the card background.

Any CSS can be placed in the styling section – advanced users may wish to do
things like add a background image or gradient, for example. If you’re
wondering how to get some particular formatting, please search the web for
information about how to do it in CSS, as there is a great deal of
documentation available.

The styling is shared between all cards, which means that when you make an
adjustment it will affect all cards for that note type. It is also possible to
specify card-specific styling, however. The following example will use a yellow
background on all cards except the first one:

One other thing to note is that Anki shrinks images to fit the screen by
default. You can change this by adding the following to the bottom of your
styling section:

img { max-width: none; max-height: none; }

If you try to change the style for images and find that the star that appears
on marked cards is affected (for instance, it becomes way too large), you can
target it with the following:

img#star { ... }

Field Styling

The default styling applies to the whole card. You can also make certain
fields or part of the card use a different font, color, and so on. This is
particularly important when studying foreign languages, as Anki will sometimes
be unable to correctly display characters unless an appropriate font has been
chosen.

Say you have an “Expression” field, and you want to give it the OSX Thai
font “Ayuthaya”. Imagine your template already reads:

What is {{Expression}}?
{{Notes}}

What we need to do is wrap the text we want to style in some HTML. We will put
the following in front of the text:

<div class=mystyle1>

And the following behind it:

</div>

By wrapping the text like the above, we tell Anki to style the wrapped text
with a custom style called “mystyle1”, which we will create later.

Thus if we wanted the entire “What is …?” expression to use the Thai font,
we would use:

<div class=mystyle1>What is {{Expression}}?</div>
{{Notes}}

And if we wanted only the expression field itself to use the Thai font, we’d
use:

What is <div class=mystyle1>{{Expression}}</div>?
{{Notes}}

After we’ve edited the template, we now need to move to the Styling section
between the templates. Before editing it, it should look something like:

You can include any styling you want in the style. If you wanted to increase
the font size too, you’d change the mystyle1 section to look like:

.mystyle1 {
font-family: ayuthaya;
font-size: 30px;
}

It’s also possible to bundle custom fonts with your deck, so you don’t need to
install them on your computer or mobile device. Please see the
installing fonts section for more info.

Please see the card styling section for more information on the
styling options you can use here.

Hint Fields

It’s possible to add a field to the front or back of a card, but make it
hidden until you explicitly show it. We call this a hint field. Before
adding a hint, please bear in mind that the easier you make it to answer a
question in Anki, the less likely you are to remember that question when you
encounter it in real life. Please have a read about the minimum information
principle on http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm before proceeding.

First, you’ll need to add a field to store the hint in if you have not already.
Please see the fields section if you’re not sure how to do this.

Assuming you’ve created a field called MyField, you can tell Anki to include it
on the card but hide it by default by adding the following to your template:

{{hint:MyField}}

This will show a link labeled “show hint”; when you click it, the content of
the field will be displayed on the card. (If MyField is empty, nothing will be
shown.)

If you show the hint on the question and then reveal the answer, the hint will
be hidden again. If you want to have the hint always revealed when the answer
is shown, you will need to remove {{FrontSide}} from your back template and
manually add the fields you wish to appear.

Note

It is not currently possible to use a hint field for audio — the audio
will play regardless of whether you’ve clicked on the hint link.

If you want to customize the appearance or behaviour, you’ll need to implement
the hint field yourself. We can not provide any support for doing so, but the
following code should get you started:

Special Fields

There are some special fields you can include in your templates:

The note's tags: {{Tags}}
The type of note: {{Type}}
The card's deck: {{Deck}}
The card's subdeck: {{Subdeck}}
The type of card ("Forward", etc): {{Card}}
The content of the front template (only valid in back template): {{FrontSide}}

FrontSide will not include any audio that was on the front side of the card.
If you wish to have the same audio play on both the front and back of the
card, you’ll need to manually include the audio fields on the back as well.

As with other fields, special field names are case sensitive.

Card Generation & Deletion

Anki will not create cards with empty front sides. Thus if “My Field” was
empty, and one card’s front template included only that field, the card would
not be created.

If no cards can be created because all of the cards would have empty front
sides, then the Add Notes window will warn you and not allow the note to be
added until at least one card would be generated.

When you edit a previously added note, Anki will automatically create extra
cards if they were previously blank but no longer are. If your edits have made
some cards blank when they previously were not, however, Anki will not delete
them immediately, as that could lead to accidental data loss. To remove the
empty cards, go to Tools → Empty Cards in the main window. You will be shown a
list of empty cards and be given the option to delete them.

Because of the way that card generation works, it is not possible to manually
delete individual cards (they would just end up being recreated the next time
the note was edited). Instead, you should make the relevant conditional
replacement fields empty and then use the Empty Cards option. (If you don’t
have fields set up to control card generation, please see the sections on
reversed cards and selective card generation.) If you need to do this for many notes at once, you can use the
find and replace feature in the browser.

Anki does not consider special fields or non-field text for the purposes of
card generation. Thus if your front template looked like the following, no
card would be generated if Country was empty:

Where is {{Country}} on the map?

Selective Card Generation

Sometimes you may want to generate extra cards for only some of your material,
such as testing your ability to recall the most important words of a set. You
can accomplish this by adding an extra field to your note, and adding some
text into it (such as "1") on the notes you want the extra card. Then in the
card template, you can make the card’s creation depend on that field being
non-empty. For more information on this, please see the conditional
replacement section below.

Media & LaTeX References

Anki does not scan templates for media references, because it is slow to do
so. This has implications for including media on the template.

Static Sounds/Images

If you wish to include images or sounds on your cards that are the same for
every card (eg, a company logo at the top of each card):

Rename the file so it starts with an underscore, eg "_logo.jpg". The
underscore tells Anki that the file is used by the template and it should
be exported when sharing the deck.

Add a reference to the media on your front or back template, like:

<img src="_logo.jpg">

Field References

Media references to fields are not allowed. They may or may not display during
review, and will not work when checking for unused media, importing/exporting,
and so on. Examples that won’t work:

Instead, you should include the media references in the field. Please
see the importing section for more information.

Conditional Replacement

It is possible to include certain text, fields, or HTML on your cards only if a
field is empty or not empty. An example:

This text is always shown.
{{#FieldName}}
This text is only shown if FieldName has text in it
{{/FieldName}}
{{^FieldName}}
This text is only shown if FieldName is empty
{{/FieldName}}

A real life example is only showing a label if the field is not empty:

{{#Tags}}Tags: {{Tags}}{{/Tags}}

Or say you want to display a specific field in blue on the front of your card
if there are extra notes on the back (perhaps the fact that there are notes
serves as a reminder that you should spend more time thinking about the
answer). You can style the field as follows:

You can also use conditional replacement to control which cards are generated.
This works since Anki will not generate cards which would
have a blank front side. For example, consider a card with two fields on the
front:

{{Expression}}
{{Notes}}

Normally a card would be generated if either the expression or notes field had
text in it. If you only wanted a card generated if expression was not empty,
then you could change the template to this:

{{#Expression}}
{{Expression}}
{{Notes}}
{{/Expression}}

And if you wanted to require both fields, you could use two conditional
replacements:

Keep in mind that, as mentioned in the card generation
section, this only works when you place the conditional replacement code on the
front of the card; if you do this on the back, you will simply end up with
cards with a blank back side. Similarly, since this works by checking if the front field would be empty, it is important to make sure you wrap the entire front side in the conditional replacement; for instance, the following would not work as expected:

{{#Expression}}
{{Expression}}
{{/Expression}}
{{Notes}}

The default behaviour can be thought of as an "OR" condition - cards are
created if the first field is non-empty, OR the second field is non-empty, and
so on. The behaviour above can be thought of as an "AND" condition - cards are
created if the first field is non-empty AND the second field is non-empty, and
so on.

A caveat: Anki is not currently able to mix AND and OR conditions. Thus the
following template, which says "require expression and notes, or field 3",
would not work:

Cloze Templates

The cloze note type functions differently from regular note types. Instead of a
customizable number of card types, it has a single type which is shared by all
cloze deletions on a note.

As mentioned in the card generation section above, generation of regular cards
depends on one or more fields on the question being non-empty. Cloze deletion
note types are generated differently:

Anki looks on the front template for one or more cloze replacements,
like {{cloze:FieldName}}.

It then looks in the FieldName field for all cloze references, like
{{c1::text}}.

For each separate number, a card will be generated.

Because card generation functions differently for cloze deletion cards,
{{cloze:…}} tags can not be used with a regular note type - they will only
function properly when used with a cloze note type.

Conditional generation provides a special field so you can check which card
you are rendering. If you wanted to display the "hint1" field on the first
cloze, and "hint2" field on the second cloze for example, you could use the
following template:

{{cloze:Text}}
{{#c1}}
{{Hint1}}
{{/c1}}
{{#c2}}
{{Hint2}}
{{/c2}}

Other HTML

Your templates can contain arbitrary HTML, which means that all the layout
possibilities used on internet web pages can also be used on your cards.
Things like tables, lists, images, links to external pages and so on are all
supported. With tables for example, you could change the layout so that the
front and back of a card appear on the left and right instead of the top and
bottom.

Covering all of HTML’s features is outside the scope of this manual, but there
are plenty of good introductory guides to HTML available on the web if you’d
like to learn more.

Dictionary Links

You can also use field replacement to create dictionary links. Imagine you’re
studying a language and your favourite online dictionary allows you to search
for text using a web URL like:

http://example.com/search?q=myword

You could add an automatic link by doing the following in your template:

The template above would allow you to search for each note’s expression by
clicking on the link while reviewing. There is a caveat however, so please see
the next section.

HTML Stripping

Like templates, fields are stored in HTML. In the dictionary link example
above, if the expression contained the word "myword" without any formatting,
then the HTML would be the same: "myword". But when you include formatting in
your fields, extra HTML is included. If "myword" was bolded for example, the
actual HTML would be "<b>myword</b>".

This can present a problem for things like dictionary links. In the above
example, the dictionary link would end up being:

The extra characters in the link would likely confuse the dictionary site, and
you’re likely not to get any matches.

To solve this, Anki provides the ability to strip formatting from fields when
they are replaced. If you prefix a field name with text:, Anki will not
include any formatting. So a dictionary link that worked even with formatted
text would be:

Browser Appearance

If your card templates are complex, it may be difficult to read the question and
answer columns (called "Front" and "Back") in the card list. The
"browser appearance" option allows you to define a custom template to be used only
in the browser, so you can include only the important fields and change the
order if you desire. The syntax is the same as in standard card templates.

RTL (right to left) text

If you’re learning a language that reads from right to left, you’ll need to
adjust the template like so:

<div dir=rtl>{{FieldThatHasRTLTextInIt}}</div>

If you were linked directly here, please see the start of this section for
more information.

Platform-Specific CSS

Anki defines some special CSS classes that allow you to define different
styling for different platforms. The example below shows how to vary the font
depending on where you’re reviewing:

Installing Fonts

If you’re using Anki on a work or school computer where you don’t have
permission to install new fonts, or you’re using Anki on a mobile device, it’s
possible to add fonts directly to Anki.

To add a font to Anki, it must be in the TrueType format. TrueType fonts have
a filename ending in .ttf, such as "Arial.ttf". Once you’ve located a TrueType
font, we’ll need to add it to the media folder:

Rename the file, adding an underscore at the start, so it becomes like
"_arial.ttf". Adding an underscore will tell Anki that this file will be
used on a template, and should not be deleted when checking for unused media.

In your computer’s file browser, go to your Anki Folder, and then a
folder called "User 1" (or your profile name if you’ve renamed/added profiles).

Inside the folder, you should see a folder called collection.media. Drag
the renamed file to that folder.

After that, we need to update the template:

Click Add at the top of the main screen, and then select the note type
you want to change with the top left button.

Click Cards.

In the styling section, add the following text to the bottom (after the
last "}" character), replacing
"_arial.ttf" with the name of the file you copied into your media folder:

@font-face { font-family: myfont; src: url('_arial.ttf'); }

Note

Only change the "arial" part, not the "myfont" part.

After that, you can either change the font for the entire card, or for
individual fields. To change the font for the entire card, simply locate the
font-family: line in the .card section and change the font to "myfont". To
change the font for only certain fields, please see the Field Styling instructions above.

Note

Please make sure the filenames match exactly. If the file is called
arial.TTF and you write arial.ttf in your card templates, it will not work.

Fonts on a Mac

Embedded fonts currently do not work on OS X. It is still possible to use
custom fonts, but they need to be installed system wide.

Replace "Helvetica" with the name of the font you installed on your system.
Keep "myfont" as is, as it references the font you embedded.

Javascript

As Anki cards are treated like webpages, it is possible to embed some
Javascript on your cards via inline script tags in the template (loading
external files using src= is not supported). As this is an advanced feature, we
can not guarantee any particular Javascript will work, and can not provide any
assistance when things are not working. If in doubt, it’s best to avoid it.

Each Anki client may implement card display differently, so you will need to
test the behaviour across platforms. A number of clients are implemented
by keeping a long running webpage and dynamically updating parts of it as cards
are reviewed, so your Javascript will need to update sections of the document
using things like document.getElementById() rather than doing things like
document.write().

Functions like window.alert are also not available. Anki will write
javascript errors to the terminal, so if you’re running on a Mac or Windows
computer, you’ll need to manually catch the errors and write them to the
document to see them. There is no debugger available, so to figure out
problems you’ll need to break down your code until you discover which parts
are causing problems.

Profiles & Preferences

Profiles

If more than one person wants to use Anki on your computer, you can set up a
separate profile for each user. Each user profile has their own collection,
and own program settings. Profiles are configured by going to the File menu
and choosing "Switch Profile".

Note

Profiles are intended to be used by different people, and each AnkiWeb
account can only keep one profile in sync. For dividing up your own content,
you should use separate decks rather than separate profiles, except when using
extra profiles for experimenting with changes you don’t plan to sync
to other devices.

It’s possible to assign a password to your profile by going to Anki’s
preferences window. Your collection is not encrypted, and people can still
tamper with the file if they locate it on your hard disk. The password
protection is mainly intended to make it harder for students to tamper with
each other’s decks and settings in a classroom environment.

Preferences

The preferences are available from the Tools menu on Windows/Linux, or the
Anki menu on a Mac. If you have multiple profiles, any changes you make will
apply only to the current profile.

Basic

The Strip HTML option controls whether Anki should strip the formatting from
text you paste into the editor. By default, Anki strips the formatting from
pasted text so that you can control formatting in your card templates instead.
If you’d prefer the formatting to be preserved (so you can paste bolded text,
etc), you can uncheck this option.

By default Anki pastes images on the clipboard as JPG files, to save disk
space. You can use the Paste clipboard images as PNG option to paste as PNG
images instead. PNG images support transparent backgrounds and are lossless,
but they usually result in much larger file sizes.

The first drop-down box controls how note types and decks interact. The default
of "When adding, default to current deck" means that Anki saves the last-used
note type for each deck and selects it again then next time you choose the deck
(and, in addition, will start with the current deck selected when choosing Add
from anywhere). The other option, "Change deck depending on note type," saves
the last-used deck for each note type (and opens the add window to the
last-used note type when you choose Add). This may be more convenient if you
always use a single note type for each deck.

The second drop-down box controls when new cards are shown: either mixed with,
before, or after all reviews.

The Next day starts at option controls when Anki should start showing the
next day’s cards. The default setting of 4AM ensures that if you’re studying
around midnight, you won’t have two days' worth of cards shown to you in one
session. If you stay up very late or wake up very early, you may want to
adjust this to a time you’re usually sleeping.

The Learn ahead limit tells Anki how to behave when there is nothing left to
study in the current deck but cards in learning. The default setting of 20
minutes tells Anki that cards should be shown early if they have a delay of
less than 20 minutes and there’s nothing else to do. If you set this to 0,
Anki will always wait the full delay, showing the congratulations screen until
the remaining cards are ready to be reviewed.

Timeboxing is a technique to help you focus by dividing a longer activity
(such as a 30 minute study session) into smaller blocks. If you set the
timebox time limit to a non-zero number of minutes, Anki will periodically
show you how many cards you’ve managed to study during the prescribed time
limit.

Deck Options

Deck options are accessed by selecting a deck on the Decks screen, and then
clicking Options at the bottom of the screen.

Anki allows you to share options between different decks, to make updating
options in many decks at once easy. To do this, options are grouped into an
options group. By default, all newly created decks use the same options
group, and decks imported from previous versions of Anki have separate option
groups. If you’d like to alter the settings on one deck but not other decks,
click the gears icon in the top right and add a new options group.

Please only change options that you fully understand, as inappropriate
adjustments may render Anki less effective.

Note

Options are not retroactive. For example, if you change an option that
controls the delay after failing a card, cards that you failed prior to
changing the option will have the old delay, not the new one.

New Cards

Steps controls the number of learning repetitions, and the delay between
them. Please see the learning section for an overview of how the
steps work.

Steps over a day (1440 minutes) are supported as well - if you want, you can
define a schedule like 10 minutes, 1 day, 3 days and then finally 7 days
before the card becomes a review card.

Note

If there’s nothing else to study, Anki will show cards up to 20 minutes
early by default. The amount of time to look ahead is configurable in the
preferences. One thing to be aware of is that the due counts
will differ between the deck screen and study screens in this case. The
deck screen will not count cards that are not ready, but the study screen
will. This is done so that you can tell which decks need your attention.

Note

Anki treats small steps and steps that cross a day boundary differently.
With small steps, the cards are shown as soon as the delay has passed, in
preference to other waiting cards like reviews. This is done so that you can
answer the card as closely to your requested delay as possible. In contrast,
cards that cross a day boundary are scheduled on a per-day basis like reviews
are. When you return to study the next day, the per-day learning cards will
not be shown first, as that can make the first half of a review session
frustratingly difficult. Instead, the cards will be shown after reviews are
completed. They are included in the review count rather than the learning
count, due to the way they are handled internally.

Order controls whether Anki should add new cards into the deck randomly, or
in order. When you change this option, Anki will re-sort the decks using the
current option group. One caveat with random order mode: if you review many of
your new cards and then add more new cards, the newly added material is
statistically more likely to appear than the previously remaining cards. To
correct this, you can change the order to ordered mode and back again to force
a re-sort.

Note

When you select random order, Anki will randomize your notes, keeping the
cards of a given note close together. The cards of a given note are shown in
the order their card types appear in, so that siblings are introduced
consistently - otherwise you could end up in a state where some notes had all
their cards introduced and other notes had only one or two. Please see the
"bury related" option below for more info.

New cards/day tells Anki how many new cards you’d like introduced on each
day you open the program. Missed days will not cause the cards to pile up. The
limit applies to the current deck and subdecks. This means if "French" has a
limit of 20 cards and "French::Lesson 1" and "French::Lesson 2" both have
limits of 15 cards, you’ll get 15 cards from lesson 1 but only 5 cards from
lesson 2.

Note

Studying new cards will temporarily increase the number of reviews you
need to do a day, as freshly learnt material needs to be repeated a number of
times before the delay between repetitions can increase appreciably. If you
are consistently learning 20 new cards a day, you can expect your daily reviews
to be roughly about 200 cards/day. You can decrease the reviews required by
introducing fewer new cards each day, or by turning off new card display until
your review burden decreases. More than one Anki user has excitedly studied
hundreds of new cards over their first few days of using the program, and then
become overwhelmed by the reviews required.

Graduating interval is the delay between answering Good on a card with no
steps left, and seeing the card again.

Easy interval is the delay between answering easy on a learning card and
seeing it in review mode for the first time.

Starting ease controls the easiness that cards start out with. It is set
when a card graduates from learning for the first time. It defaults to 250%,
meaning that once you’ve finished learning a card, answering "Good" on
subsequent reviews will increase the delay by approximately 2.5x (eg if the
last delay was 10 days, the next delay would be 25 days). Based upon how you
rate the card in subsequent reviews, the easiness may increase or decrease from
what it starts out as.

Turning off bury related… will prevent Anki from burying siblings, and instead Anki will just try to avoid showing siblings directly
after one another in the same session. For this to work, your new cards/day
setting needs to be large enough for the cards of multiple notes to be
included.

Reviews

Maximum reviews/day allows you to set an upper limit on the number of
reviews to show each day. When this limit is reached, Anki will not show any
more review cards for the day, even if there are some waiting. If you study
consistently, this setting can help to smooth out occasional peaks in due card
counts, and can save you from a heart attack when returning to Anki after a
week off. When reviews have been hidden due to this option, a message will
appear in the congratulations screen, suggesting you consider increasing the
limit if you have time.

Easy bonus allows you to set the difference in intervals between answering
Good and Easy on a card. For instance, with the default value of 130%, Easy will give an interval that is 1.3 times the Good interval.

Interval modifier allows you to apply a multiplication factor to the
intervals Anki generates. At its default of 100% it does nothing; if you set it
to 80% for example, intervals will be generated at 80% of their normal size
(so a 10 day interval would become 8 days). You can thus use the multiplier to
make Anki present cards more or less frequently than it would otherwise,
trading study time for retention or vice versa.

For moderately difficult material, the average user should find they remember
approximately 90% of mature cards that come up for review. You can find out
your own performance by opening the graphs/statistics for a deck and looking
at the Answer Buttons graph - mature retention is the correct% on the right
side of the graph. If you haven’t been studying long you may not have any
mature cards yet. As performance with new cards and younger cards can vary
considerably, it’s a good idea to wait until you have a reasonable amount of
mature reviews before you start drawing conclusions about your retention rate.

On the SuperMemo website, they suggest that you can find an appropriate
multiplier for a desired retention rate. Their formula boils down to:

log(desired retention%) / log(current retention%)

Imagine we have a current retention rate of 85% and we want to increase it to
90%. We’d calculate the modifier as:

If you plug the resulting 65% into the interval modifier, you should find
over time that your retention moves closer to your desired retention.

One important thing to note however is that the tradeoff between time spent
studying and retention is not linear: we can see here that to increase our
retention by 5 percentage points, we’d have to study 35% more frequently. If
the material you are learning is very important then it may be worth the extra
effort – that’s something you’ll need to decide for yourself. If you’re simply
worried that you’re forgetting too much, you may find investing more time into
the initial learning stage and/or making mnemonics gives you more gain for
less effort.

One final thing to note is that Anki forces a new interval to be at least 1
day longer than it was previously so that you don’t get stuck reviewing with
the same interval forever. If your goal is to repeat a card once a day for
multiple days, you can do that by setting more learning mode steps instead of
by adjusting this modifier.

Maximum interval allows you to place an upper limit on the time Anki will
wait to reshow a card. The default is 100 years; you can decrease this to a
smaller number if you’re willing to trade extra study time for higher
retention.

Turning off bury related… will prevent Anki from burying siblings, and instead Anki will just try to avoid showing siblings directly
after one another in the same session.

Note

Review cards are always shown in random order. If you wish to see them in
a different order, you can use a filtered deck. More specifically,
Anki randomizes reviews by grabbing batches of 50 cards in the order that they
exist in the database, randomizing each batch, then putting them together. This
means that there is a slight bias towards older cards being shown first, but it
prevents individual cards from showing up in a predictable order.

Lapses

When you forget a review card, it is said to have lapsed. The default
behaviour for lapsed reviews is to reset the interval to 1 (ie, make it due
tomorrow), and put it in the learning queue for a refresher in 10 minutes.
This behaviour can be customized with the options listed below.

If you leave the steps blank, Anki will not place the card back in the
learning queue, and it will be rescheduled as a review with its new interval
determined by the settings below.

Note

The new interval is determined when you answer "Again" to a review card,
not when the card finishes its relearning steps. For this reason, the "Good"
and "Easy" buttons during relearing do not alter the interval again - they
only control which step you are on. If there is only a single step (the
default), the "Easy" button will be hidden, since it would accomplish the same
thing as the "Good" button. If you have 2 or more steps, "Easy" is not hidden,
to allow you to graduate cards from the queue before all of their steps are
finished.

New interval controls how much Anki should reduce the previous interval by.
If the card had a 100 day interval, the default of 0% would reduce the
interval to 0 (but see the next option). If you set this option to 20%, the
card would have its interval reduced to 20 days instead.

Minimum interval allows you to apply a minimum limit to the above option.
The default setting says that lapses should be reviewed one day later. The
interval must be 1 day or more.

The leech options control the way Anki handles leeches. Please see the leech
section for more information.

General

Anki monitors how long it takes you to answer each question so that it can
show you how long was spent studying each day. The time taken does not
influence scheduling. If you take longer than 60 seconds, Anki assumes you
have walked away from your computer or have been distracted, and limits the
recorded time to 60 seconds, so that you don’t end up with inaccurate
statistics. The ignore answer times… option allows you to adjust the
cutoff threshold. The minimum cutoff is 30 seconds.

If show answer timer is checked, Anki will display the current time taken
for each card in the study area.

By default, Anki automatically plays audio on the front and back of cards. If
you uncheck automatically play audio, Anki will not play audio until you
press the replay audio key, r or F5.

The when answer shown, replay both question and answer audio option controls
what happens when you choose to replay audio while the answer is shown. Please
note that it does not control what happens when you show the answer; for that
please see this section.

Description

This section allows you to edit the deck description, which is shown in the
study overview. The description is automatically set when downloading shared
decks. You can delete all the text in the description if you no longer want to
see it in the study overview area.

You can also use HTML in the description—anything that works on a note should
be valid.

AnkiWeb and Synchronization

AnkiWeb is a service that allows you to keep your collection synchronized across
multiple devices, and to study online. Please sign up for a free
account before following the steps below.

Setup

To start syncing your collection across devices, click the sync button (the
top right one on the main screen), or press y on your keyboard. You’ll be
prompted for your AnkiWeb ID and password, which you created in the signup
process.

When you synchronize your collection for the first time, Anki will ask you if
you want to upload or download. If you have cards on your computer and your
AnkiWeb account is empty, choose "upload" to send your data to AnkiWeb. If you
have cards on AnkiWeb from another device, and no cards on your computer,
choose "download" to replace the empty local collection with the cards that
are on AnkiWeb. If you have different cards on both devices,
more work is required to avoid losing data.

Once the initial one way sync is completed, Anki will be able to merge changes
from multiple locations with a few exceptions.

Note

If you have multiple people using Anki on one machine and have
created a profile for each user, each user will need to create their own
AnkiWeb account to sync with. If you attempt to synchronize multiple profiles
with a single AnkiWeb account, you will lose data.

Automatic Syncing

Once syncing is enabled, Anki will automatically sync each time your
collection is closed or opened. If you would prefer to synchronize manually,
you can disable automatic syncing in Anki’s preferences.

Media

Anki will synchronize any sounds and images used by your notes. It will notice
when media has been added or removed from your media folder, but will not
notice if you have edited some existing files without adding or removing any.
To get your edits noticed, you need to add or remove a file as well.

Note

If you’re running Anki off a USB flash drive, you should use an NTFS
file system, as Anki may not be able to detect media changes on a FAT32
filesystem.

Conflicts

Reviews and note edits can be merged, so if you review or edit on two
different devices before syncing, Anki will preserve your changes from both
locations. If the same card has been reviewed in two different locations, both
reviews will be marked in the revision history, and the card will be kept in
the state it was when it was most recently answered.

There are certain changes that Anki is unable to merge. These mainly relate to
the format of notes: things like adding a new field, or removing a card
template. When you perform an operation that can’t be merged, Anki will warn
you, and give you the option of aborting the operation. If you choose to
continue, you’ll be asked to choose whether to keep the local copy or the copy
on AnkiWeb when your collection is next synchronized.

If you choose Upload to make the content on AnkiWeb a copy of the content on
your local device, you then need to sync any other devices you use, and choose
Download, so they too have the same content. Once all devices have the same
content, future syncs will be able to merge again.

If you wish to force a full upload or download (for example, because you
accidentally deleted a deck on one side and want to restore the deck rather
than having its deletion synchronized), you can check the "On next sync, force
changes in one direction" box in Tools>Preferences>Network, then sync as usual.
(You’ll be given the option to choose which side you want to use.)

Merging Conflicts

Because the first sync can only sync changes in one
direction, if you have added different content to different devices or
profiles before setting syncing up, content on one device will be lost if you
overwrite it with the content from the other device. With some work, it is
possible to manually merge data into a single collection.

Start by taking a backup on each device/profile, in case something goes wrong. With
the computer version you can use File>Export to export "all decks" with
scheduling information and media files included, and save the file somewhere
safe. In AnkiMobile, the Add/Export button on the decks list screen will let
you export all decks with media.

Next, if one of your devices is a mobile device, synchronize it first. If
there’s a conflict, choose "upload" to overwrite any existing data on AnkiWeb
with the data from your mobile device. If both devices/profiles are on your
computer, synchronize the device/profile with the most number of decks first.

Now return to the other device/profile. If automatic syncing is enabled, a
message may pop up asking if you want to upload or download. Click the cancel
button - we don’t want to sync yet.

Once you’re looking at the deck list, click the cog icon next to the first
deck, and choose "export". Export the content with scheduling information and
media included, and save the .apkg file somewhere. Now you’ll need to repeat
this for each top-level deck.

Once all top-level decks have been exported, click the sync button at the top
right, and choose "download", which will overwrite the local content with the
content you synced from your other device.

You can now use File>Import to import the .apkg files you exported earlier,
which will merge the exported content with the existing content, so everything will
be in one place.

Firewalls

Anki needs to be able to make outbound HTTPS connections to sync. At a minimum
it must be able to connect to ankiweb.net, sync.ankiweb.net and
msync.ankiweb.net. These domains may change over time, and the IP addresses
they point to may also change, so we recommend you allow
wildcard access to *.ankiweb.net to reduce the chance of the firewall rules
needing to be updated in the future.

If you have a firewall on your machine, you should add an exception for Anki. If
you are on a work or school network, please contact your network administrator
for assistance - it is not something we can help you with.

Proxies

If you need a proxy to access the internet, Anki should automatically pick up
your system proxy settings if you’re on Windows or OS X, and will honour the
HTTP_PROXY environment variable if you’re on another platform.

Please note that advanced proxy setup via .pac or .wpad files is not supported
in Anki.

To override the system proxy settings on Windows or OS X, define a HTTP_PROXY
environmental variable that points to the proxy server. It will look like:

The toolkit Anki is built on is unfortunately not currently able to
pick up your proxy username and password from your system settings. This means
that if you use a proxy that requires authentication, syncing will fail. In
this case, you will need to use an environmental variable that defines your
proxy details as described above, or use a personal proxy server that you
route traffic through, which in turn connects to the upstream proxy that requires
authentication.

Note

Heavily locked down networks that intercept secure connections and present
their own certificate instead may cause Anki to throw up SSL errors. We do not
support using Anki in such environments.

Browser

The browser (which has nothing to do with web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox)
allows you to search through your cards and notes and edit them. It is opened
by clicking on Browse in the main window, or by pressing b on your
keyboard. It is comprised of three sections: the sidebar on the left, the
card list on the top right, and the current note on the bottom right. By
positioning the mouse between two sections, it is possible to click and drag to
expand one section and shrink another.

Sidebar

The sidebar on the left allows quick access to common search terms. Various
search terms as described below are listed, along with all deck names and tag
names. Clicking on an item will search for it.

You can hold down Ctrl (command on a Mac) and click in order to append the
clicked item to the current search with an AND condition, instead of starting a
new search. If you wanted to show learning cards that were also in the German
deck for instance, you could click on "Learning", then ctrl+click on "German".

You can hold down Shift to create an OR search instead of an AND. For example,
you could click one deck, then shift-click another to show cards from either of
the decks in the same view.

You can hold down Alt (option on a Mac) in order to reverse the search (prepend
a -) – for instance, to show all cards in a current deck that do not have a
certain tag. Alt/option can be combined with either Ctrl or Shift (e.g., Ctrl-Alt-clicking will result in adding a new search term that is negated).

To remove tags that are not used by any notes, use Tools>Check Database from
the main window.

Searching

Above the card list is a search box. You can type in various things there to
search for cards. (If you’d rather select what you’re looking for in a list,
please take a look at the sidebar section above.)

Simple searches

When you type some text into the search box, Anki finds matching notes and
displays their cards. Anki searches in all fields of the notes, but does not
search for tags (see later in this section for how to search for tags). Some
examples:

When multiple search terms are provided, Anki looks for notes that match
all of the terms.

You can use "or" if you only need one of the terms to match.

You can prepend a minus sign to a term to find notes that don’t match.

If you want to search for something including a space or parenthesis, enclose
it in quotes.

You can group search terms by placing them in parentheses, as in the dog
(cat or mouse) example. This becomes important when combining OR and AND
searches — in the example, with the parentheses, it matches either dog
cat or dog mouse, whereas without them it would match either dog and
cat or mouse.

Anki is only able to search within formatting in the sort field you’ve configured. For example, if you add "example" to one of your
fields, this will not be matched when searching for "example" unless that field
is the sort field. If a word is not formatted, or the formatting does not change
in the middle of the word, then Anki will be able to find it in any field.

Limiting to a field

You can also ask Anki to match only if a particular field contains some text.
Unlike the searches above, searching on fields requires an exact match by
default.

front:dog

find notes with a Front field of exactly "dog". A field that
says "a dog" will not match.

front:*dog*

find notes with Front field containing dog somewhere

front:

find notes that have an empty Front field

front:_*

find notes that have a non-empty Front field

front:*

find notes that have a Front field, empty or not

Tags, decks, cards and notes

tag:animal

find notes with the tag "animal"

tag:none

find notes with no tags

tag:ani*

find notes with tags starting with ani

deck:french

find cards in a French deck, or subdecks like French::Vocab

deck:french -deck:french::*

find cards in French, but not subdecks

deck:"french vocab"

searching when a deck has a space

"deck:french vocab"

also ok

deck:filtered

filtered decks only

-deck:filtered

normal decks only

card:forward

search for Forward cards

card:1

search for cards by template number - eg, to find the second cloze
deletion for a note, you’d use card:2

Cards that have lapsed fall into several of these categories, so it may be useful to combine them to get more precise results:

is:learn is:review

cards that have lapsed and are awaiting relearning

-is:learn is:review

review cards, not including lapsed cards

is:learn -is:review

cards that are in learning for the first time

Card properties

prop:ivl>=10

cards with interval of 10 days or more

prop:due=1

cards due tomorrow

prop:due=-1

cards due yesterday that haven’t been answered yet

prop:due>-1 prop:due<1

cards due between yesterday and tomorrow

prop:reps<10

cards that have been answered less than 10 times

prop:lapses>3

cards that have moved into relearning more than 3 times

prop:ease!=2.5

cards easier or harder than default

Note that due only matches review cards and learning cards with an interval of
a day or more: cards in learning with small intervals like 10 minutes are not
included.

Recently added

added:1

cards added today

added:7

cards added in last week

The check is made against card creation time rather than note creation time,
so cards that were generated within the time frame will be included even if
their notes were added a long time ago.

Recently answered

rated:1

cards answered today

rated:1:2

cards answered Hard (2) today

rated:7:1

cards answered Again (1) over the last 7 days

rated:31:4

cards answered Easy (4) in the last month

For speed, rating searches are limited to 31 days.

Object IDs

nid:123

all cards of the note with note id 123

cid:123

the card with card id 123

mid:123

find note types with note type id 123

Note and card IDs can be found in the card info dialog in the browser.
Note type IDs can be found by clicking on a note type in the Browse screen.
These searches may also be helpful when doing add-on development or otherwise
working closely with the database.

Note

Object IDs will not work in the mobile clients, and are not intended to be
used in filtered decks at the moment.

Card List

The card list displays cards that match the current search.

The columns are configurable: right click on one (or ctrl+click on a Mac) to
choose which columns you’d like to see. You can drag columns to reorder them.
Clicking on a column will sort by that column; click again to reverse the sort
order. Not all columns can be sorted on.

Note

The due column behaves differently for different types of cards. New cards
show a number rather than a due date, which indicates the order the new cards
will be presented in. Cards in (re)learning and reviews will both show a due
date, but when sorting they are first grouped by type and then sorted by date.

Note

The "edited" and "changed" columns sound the same but track different
things. "Edited" tracks the last time changes were made to the note (e.g.,
when the content of a field was edited), while "changed" tracks the last time
changes were made to the card (e.g., when you reviewed the card and the
review history and interval were updated).

When you click on a card, its note will be shown in the bottom section. If you
drag the mouse or hold ctrl or command to select multiple cards, the editor
will be temporarily hidden. Various operations (such as changing the deck) can
operate on multiple cards at once.

The background colour will change depending on the card. Marked cards are a
shade of purple. Suspended cards are a shade of yellow. For more information
about marked and suspended cards, please see editing and more.

One of the available columns is called the sort field. Anki allows you to
choose one field from each type of note to be used for sorting. You can change
the sort field by clicking on "Fields…" in the current note section.

The question and answer columns display what you’d see on the question and
answer while reviewing, except the answer column will strip the question part
for clarity. You can also choose a custom format in the
card type editor instead of showing what would be seen during review.

Current Note

The bottom right area displays the currently selected card’s note. For more
information about cards and notes, please see the basics. For more
information on formatting buttons, please see editing.

You can see a preview of what the currently selected card would look like when
reviewing by clicking the "preview" button next to the search box. Note that
this will not display any type answer fields on your cards, which makes it
easier to preview cards quickly.

Toolbar

Up the top of the browser window is the toolbar.

Info shows various information about the currently selected card, including
its review history. For more information, see the statistics section.

Change Deck allows you to move cards to a different deck. Cards can be placed
in different decks, so if you want to move all cards in a note, you should
first use Edit > Select Notes.

Add Tags and Remove Tags allow you to add or remove tags from notes in
bulk. To remove unused tags from the list on the left, use Tools>Check
Database from the main window.

Delete removes the selected card(s) and their notes. It is not possible to
remove individual cards, as individual cards are controlled by the
templates.

Find and Replace

This option (Edit→Find and Replace…) allows you to replace text in the notes
you have selected. The regular expression option allows you to perform complex
replacements. For example, given the following text in a field:

<img src="pic.jpg" />

Searching for:

<img src="(.+?)" />

And replacing with the regexp:

\1

Will change the card to:

pic.jpg

A full discussion on regular expressions is outside the scope of this
document. There are a number of tutorials available on the web. Please see
http://docs.python.org/library/re.html for the particular format Anki uses.

Finding Duplicates

You can use the Edit>Find Duplicates option to search for notes that have the
same content. When you open the window, Anki will look at all of your note
types and present a list of all possible fields. If you want to look for
duplicates in the "Back" field, you’d select it from the list and then click
"Search".

Unlike the check that happens when you add cards manually, the duplicate
finding feature is not limited to a single note type. This means that by
default, it will search in all note types that have the field you provided.

The optional limit text box allows you to narrow down where Anki will look
for duplicates. If you only want to search for duplicates in the "French Vocab"
and "French Verbs" note types, you would enter:

note:'french vocab' or note:'french verbs'

Or you might want to look only for duplicates in a particular deck, so you could use:

deck:'myDeck'

The search syntax is the same as used when searching in the browser. Please
see the searching section for more information.

You can click one of the links in the search results list to display the
duplicate notes in that set. If the search brings up a large number of
duplicates, you may wish to instead click the Tag Duplicates button, which will
tag all matching notes with "duplicate." You can then search for this tag in
the browser and handle them all from the same screen.

Other Menu Items

Some other items in the Edit menu:

Reschedule allows you to move cards to the end of the new card queue, or
reschedule them as a review card on a given date. The second option is useful
if you have imported already-learnt material, and you want to start it off
with higher initial intervals. For example, choosing 60 and 90 will give all
the imported cards an initial interval of 2 to 3 months.

The card’s revision history is not cleared when rescheduling: rescheduling
changes the current state of a card, but not its history. If you want to hide
the history, you will need to export your notes as a text file, delete the
notes, and then import the text file again, creating new notes.

Reposition allows you to change the order new cards will appear in. You can
find out the existing positions by enabling the due column, as described in
the card list section above. If you run the reposition command when multiple
cards are selected, it will apply increasing numbers to each card in turn. By
default the number increases by one for each card, but this can be adjusted by
changing the "step" setting. The Shift position of existing cards option
allows you to insert cards between currently existing ones, pushing the
currently existing ones apart. For instance, if you have five cards and you
want to move 3, 4, and 5 between 1 and 2, selecting this setting would cause
the cards to end up in the order 1, 3, 4, 5, 2. By contrast, if you turn this
option off, 2 and 3 will get the same position number (and it will thus be
random which one comes up first).

Change Note Type allows you to convert the selected notes from one type to
another. For example, imagine you have a Russian note type and a Computer note
type, and you accidentally added some computer-related text into a Russian
note. You can use this option to fix that mistake. The scheduling of cards is
not affected.

Select Notes takes the currently selected cards, finds their notes, and then
selects all cards of those notes. If your notes have only one card, this does
nothing.

The Go menu exists to provide keyboard shortcuts to jump to various parts of
the browser, and to go up and down the card list.

Filtered Decks & Cramming

When you study a regular deck in Anki, only a limited number of cards are
shown: the cards Anki thinks you’re about to forget, and a daily limit of new
cards. This is generally useful, as it ensures you don’t spend more time
studying than necessary. But sometimes it can be useful to step outside of
these normal limits, such as when you need to revise for a test, focus on
particular material, and so on. To make this possible, Anki provides a
different type of deck called a filtered deck.

Filtered decks offer a lot of possibilities. They can be used for previewing
cards, cramming cards before a test, studying particular tags, catching up on
a backlog with a particular sort order, reviewing ahead of schedule, going
over the day’s failed cards, and more.

Custom Study

The easiest way to create a filtered deck is with the Custom Study button,
which appears at the bottom of the screen when you click on a deck. It offers
some convenient presets for common tasks like reviewing the cards you’ve
failed that day. It will create a filtered deck called "Custom Study Session"
and automatically open it for you.

If an existing "Custom Study Session" deck exists, it will be emptied before a
new one is created. If you wish to keep a custom study deck, you can rename it
from the deck list.

Here is a summary of each of the options:

Increase today’s new card limit

Add more new cards to the deck you are currently studying. Note that unlike
other options, this does not create a new filtered deck, it modifies the
existing deck.

Increase today’s review card limit

If not all reviews due today were shown due to the daily review limit, this
option allows you to show more of them. Like with the new cards option, this
modifies the existing deck.

Review forgotten cards

Show all cards that you’ve answered Again (1) to within a number of days you
specify.

Review ahead

Show cards that will be due in the near future (a number of days you specify).
This is useful for working through some of your older cards before a
vacation, but it will not help with cards you have learnt recently. Please
see the reviewing ahead section below for more info.

Preview new cards

Show cards that you have recently added, without converting them to review
cards as they are answered.

Study by card state or tag

Select a certain number of cards from the current deck to study. You can
choose to select new cards only, due cards only, or all cards; after you
click "Choose Tags", you can also limit the selected cards by tags. If you
wish to see all the cards in the deck (for instance, to study before a big
test), you can set the number of cards to more than the number of cards in
the deck.

Home Decks

When a card is moved to a filtered deck, it retains a link to the deck it was
in previously. That previous deck is said to be the card’s home deck.

Cards automatically return to their home deck after they are studied in the
filtered deck. This can be after a single review, or after multiple reviews,
depending on your settings.

It is also possible to move all cards back to their home decks at once:

The "Empty" button in the study overview moves all cards in the filtered
deck back to their home deck, but does not delete the empty filtered deck.
This can be useful if you want to fill it again later (using the Rebuild
button).

Deleting a filtered deck does the same thing as "Empty" does, but also
removes the emptied deck from the deck list. No cards are deleted when you
delete a filtered deck.

Note

In the current implementation, if you create, rebuild, empty or delete a
filtered deck while cards are still in learning, they will be turned back into
new cards. In the case of failed reviews in relearning, any remaining relearning
steps will be skipped.

Creating Manually

Advanced users can create filtered decks with arbitrary search strings,
instead of relying on set presets. To create a filtered deck manually, choose
Create Filtered Deck from the Tools menu.

When you click the Build button, Anki finds cards that match the settings you
specified, and temporarily moves them from their existing decks into your new
filtered deck for study.

If you wish to fetch cards again using the same filter options (for instance, if
you want to study all cards with a particular tag every day), you can use the
Rebuild button at the bottom of the deck’s overview screen.

The search area controls what cards Anki will gather. All of the searches
possible in the browser are also possible for filtered decks, such as limiting
to tags, finding cards forgotten a certain number of times, and so on. Please
see the searching section of the manual for more information on
the different possibilities.

Note

Filtered decks can not include cards that are suspended, buried, or
already in a different filtered deck. For this reason, a search in the browser
may reveal cards that don’t end up in the filtered deck.

The limit option controls how many cards will be gathered into the deck. The
order you select controls both the order cards are gathered in, and the order
they will be reviewed in. If you select "most lapses" and a limit of 20 for
example, then Anki will show you only the 20 most lapsed cards.

For efficiency reasons, if your cram deck contains more than 1000 cards, only
1000 cards will be shown as due on the deck list and study screens.

Order

The "cards selected by" option controls the order that cards will appear in. If
the maximum number of cards you select is lower than the number of cards that
match the filter criteria, Anki will exclude the cards at the end of this
sorted list first.

Oldest seen first

Display cards that you haven’t seen in reviews for the longest time first.

Random

Randomize the order of all cards that match the filter criteria (use no set
order).

Increasing intervals

Display cards that have the smallest interval first.

Decreasing intervals

Display cards that have the largest interval first.

Most lapses

Display cards that you have failed the most times first.

Order added

Display cards that you added first (have the earliest creation date) first.

Order due

Display cards with the earliest due date first.

Latest added first

Display cards that you’ve most recently added to the deck first. (This is the
opposite of Order added.)

Relative overdueness

Display cards that are most overdue in relation to their current interval
first (for instance, a card with a current interval of 5 days overdue by 2
days displays before a card with a current interval of 5 years overdue by a
week). This is useful if you have a large backlog that may take some time to
get through and want to review the cards you’re most in danger of forgetting
first.

Steps & Returning

By default, Anki will use the steps of a card’s home deck. If a new card would
normally be reviewed twice when being learnt, the same thing will happen
when you study it in a filtered deck.

Cards return to their home deck when (re)learning is complete. Thus if you
have 3 learning steps, a new card will return to its home deck upon three
presses of "Good" or a single press of "Easy".

The custom steps option allows you to override the home deck’s
steps and provide your own steps instead. The provided steps apply to both
cards being learnt, lapsed reviews, and reviews ahead of time.

Counts

In a filtered deck, reviews that were already due are displayed in the review
count as normal. Learning cards and non-due reviews are counted in the new card
count, due to how the underlying implementation works. Reviews that were not due
are not scheduled like new cards however - Anki uses a special algorithm that
takes into account how close they were to their normal due time when reviewed.

Due Reviews

If the filtered deck includes cards that were due for review, they will be
shown like they would have been in their original deck - they appear in the
review card count at the bottom of the screen, and there are four choices for
how well you remembered. Upon a correct answer, the card will be moved back to
its home deck, and its next delay adjusted using the home deck’s settings. If
you forget the card, it will be shown according to the relearning steps
defined in the home deck.

Reviewing Ahead

If your search included cards that are not due, Anki will show the reviews
ahead of time.

Anki uses a special algorithm for these reviews that takes into account how
early you are reviewing. If the cards were almost due to be shown,
they will be given a new delay similar to what they would have received if
you had reviewed them on time. If the cards are reviewed soon after they
were scheduled however, their new delay will be similar to their previous
delay. This calculation works on a sliding scale.

Note

Because reviewing a card shortly after it is scheduled has little impact
on scheduling (eg, a card due tomorrow with a one day interval will remain due
tomorrow if reviewed early), the "review ahead" custom study setting is not
appropriate for repeated use. If used to go through a week’s worth of cards
before a trip, the mature cards will be rescheduled into the future and the
new cards will remain at small intervals, because you don’t know them well
enough for them to be rescheduled further. If you review ahead again the next
day, all you’ll end up doing is going through those same new cards again, to
little benefit.

Early reviews are included in the new card count rather than the review count,
and will be shown according to the number of relearning steps defined in the
home deck (unless you have provided custom steps). This means that if you have
customized the number of relearning steps in the home deck, the non-due card
may be shown more than once.

If you have multiple steps, Anki will only consider the first answer when
deciding the next delay, and like relearning in normal decks, "Good" and
"Easy" differ only in the step change and not the resulting delay.

Rescheduling

By default, Anki will return cards to their home decks with altered scheduling
based on your performance in the filtered deck. If you disable the reschedule
cards based on my answers option, Anki will return the cards in the same
state they were in when they were moved into the filtered deck. This is useful
for quickly flipping through material.

If you have disabled rescheduling, the "Good" and "Easy" buttons will display
no time above them when pressing them would cause the card to return to its
home deck with its original scheduling.

Please note that new cards are returned to the end of the new card queue,
rather than the start of it.

Catching Up

Filtered decks can be useful for catching up when you’ve fallen behind in your
reviews. One Anki user describes the way they use the filtered decks to catch
up as follows:

I did this for a backlog of 800 cards with filtered subdecks. Worked very
well for me.

Just Due filter with: "is:due prop:due>-7"

Over Due filter with: "is:due prop:due<=-7"

The Just Due deck will then contain cards that became due in the past week.
That's the deck you should study every day as it gets the cards that become
due regularly. With this you can study as if there wasn't any backlog.

The Over Due deck will contain your backlog, cards which you didn't study in
time. You can study them the same way you would study new cards. They go back
into the regular cards, so the number of overdue will never grow as long as
you keep your Just Due deck in check.

How long it takes depends on how many overdue cards you study each day in
addition to the ones that become due regularly. You can still motor through
them when you feel like it - or you can do a specific number per day like you
would for new cards. Up to you.

Leeches

Leeches are cards that you keep on forgetting. Because they require so many
reviews, they take up a lot more of your time than other cards.

Anki can help you identify leeches. Each time a review card lapses (is failed
while it is review mode), a counter is increased. When that counter reaches 8,
the note is tagged as a leech, and the card is suspended. The threshold, and
whether to suspend or not, can be adjusted in the deck options.

Anki will continue to issue leech warnings periodically for a difficult card.
The warning interval is half the initial leech threshold. That is, if you have
Anki configured to warn at 8 lapses, future warnings will happen every 4
lapses. (12, 16, etc)

Once a leech is found, there are a number of ways you can handle it.

Waiting

Some leeches are caused by interference. For example, an English learner
may have recently learnt the words "disappoint" and "disappear". As they look
similar, the learner may find themselves confusing the two when trying to
answer. In these situations, it’s often productive to concentrate on just one
idea. When that idea is firmly ingrained in your mind, you can then return to
learning the other idea. So in these situations, you may want to leave one of
the words suspended until you have learnt the other one well, and then
unsuspend it in the browser.

Deleting

Another way to manage leeches is to delete them. Consider if the material
you’re struggling with is important enough to make it worth your while. By
selectively deleting difficult and obscure items, you can dedicate more time
to learning other material, and studying becomes a lot more fun.

Editing

Another approach is to change the way the information is presented. Perhaps
the cards you have created have too much information on them, or perhaps
you’re trying to memorize something without fully understanding it. Sometimes
spending some time changing the way the card is phrased can help. It’s also a
good time to think about making a mnemonic to help you remember.

Importing

Anki can import text files, packaged Anki decks created by the export feature,
Mnemosyne 2.0 .db files, and SuperMemo .xml files. To import a file, click the
File menu and then "Import".

Importing text files

Any plain text file that contains fields separated by commas, semicolons or
tabs can be imported into Anki, provided some conditions are met.

The files must be plain text (myfile.txt). Other formats like myfile.xls,
myfile.rtf, myfile.doc must be saved as a plain text file first.

The files must be in UTF-8 format (see below).

Anki determines the number of fields in the file by looking at the first
(non-commented) line. Any lines in the file which have a different number of
fields will be ignored.

The first line also defines the separating character – if Anki finds a ;
on the first line it will use that, if it finds a comma it’ll use that,
etc.

Fields in your text file can be mapped to any field in your notes, including
the tags field. You can choose which field in the text file corresponds to which
field in the note when you import.

When you import a text file, you can choose what deck to put the cards in. Keep
in mind that if you have the deck override option set for one or more of your
templates, the cards will go to that deck rather than the one you’ve selected.

This is an example of a valid file:

foo bar; bar baz; baz quux
apple; banana; grape

There are two ways to include newlines in fields.

Escape the multi-lines by placing the contents of the field in quotation marks:

hello; "this is
a two line answer"
two; this is a one line one

Because quotes are used to mark where a field begins and ends, if you wish to
include them inside your field, you need to replace a single doublequote
with two doublequotes to "escape" them from the regular handling, like so:

field one;"field two with ""escaped quotes"" inside it"

When you use a spreadsheet program like Libreoffice to create the CSV file for
you, it will automatically take care of escaping double quotes.

Use HTML new lines:

hello; this is<br>a two line answer
two; this is a one line one

You need to turn on the "allow HTML in fields" checkbox in the import dialog
for HTML newlines to work.

Note

Escaped multi-lines will not work correctly if you are using cloze
deletions that span multiple lines. In this case, please use HTML newlines
instead.

You can also include tags in another field and select it as a tags field in the
import dialog:

first field; second field; tags

This is an example of a valid file where the first line is ignored (#):

Spreadsheets and UTF-8

If you have non-Latin characters in your file (such as accents, Japanese and so
on), Anki expects files to be saved in a UTF-8 encoding. The easiest way to
do this is to use the free LibreOffice spreadsheet program instead of Excel to
edit your file, as it supports UTF-8 easily, and also exports multi-line
content properly, unlike Excel. If you wish to keep using Excel, please see
this
forum post for more information.

To save your spreadsheet to a file Anki can read with LibreOffice, go to
File>Save As, and then select CSV for the type of file. After accepting the
default options, LibreOffice will save the file and you can then import the
saved file into Anki.

HTML

Anki can treat text imported from text files as HTML (the language used for web
pages). This means that text with bold, italics and other formatting can be
exported to a text file and imported again. If you want to include HTML
formatting, you can check the "allow HTML in fields" checkbox when importing.
You may wish to turn this off if you’re trying to import cards whose content
contains angle brackets or other HTML syntax.

If you wish to use HTML for formatting your file but also wish to include angle
brackets, you may write them differently:

For "<", use "&lt;"

For ">", use "&gt;"

Importing Media

If you want to include audio and pictures from a text file import, copy the
files into the collection.media folder. Do not put subdirectories
in the media folder, or some features will not work.

After you’ve copied the files, change one of the fields in your text file as
follows.

<img src="myimage.jpg">

or

[sound:myaudio.mp3]

Alternatively, you can use the find & replace feature to update all the fields
at once. If each field contains text like "myaudio", and you wish to make it
play a sound, you’d search for (.*) and replace it with "[sound:\1.mp3]", with
the regular expressions option enabled.

Note

When importing a text file with these references, you must make sure to
enable the "Allow HTML" option.

You might be tempted to do this in a template, like:

<img src="{{field name}}">

Anki doesn’t support this for two reasons: searching for used media is
expensive, as each card has to be rendered, and such functionality isn’t
obvious to shared deck users. Please use the find & replace technique instead.

Bulk media imports

Another option for importing large amounts of media at once is to use the
media import add-on. This add-on
will automatically create notes for all files in a folder you select, with the
filenames on the front (minus the file extension, so if you have a file named
apple.jpg, the front would say apple) and the images or audio on the back. If
you would like a different arrangement of media and filenames, you can
change the note type of the created cards afterwards.

Adding Tags

If you want to add tag1 and tag2 to every line you’re importing, add the
following to the top of the text file:

tags:tag1 tag2

Duplicates and Updating

When importing text files, Anki uses the first field to determine if a note is
unique. By default, if the file you are importing has a first field that
matches one of the existing notes in your collection and that existing note is
the same type as the type you’re importing, the existing note’s other fields
will be updated based on content of the imported file. A drop-down box in the
import screen allows you to change this behaviour, to either ignore duplicates
completely, or import them as new notes instead of updating existing ones.

Note

The duplicate check is done for your entire collection, not just in the
current deck. If Anki is indicating that notes have not changed when you
expected them to be imported, please check that the notes are not already in
your collection somewhere.

If you have updating turned on and older versions of the notes you’re importing
are already in your collection, they will be updated in place (in their current
decks) rather than being moved to the deck you have set in the import dialog.
If notes are updated in place, the existing scheduling information on all their
cards will be preserved.

For info on how duplicates are handled in .apkg files, please see the
Deck Packages section below.

Exporting

Exporting allows you to save part of your collection as a text file or
packaged Anki deck. To export, click the File menu and choose Export.

Exporting Text

If you choose "Notes in Plain Text", Anki will write the contents of the notes
into a text file. Each field is separated by a tab. If you edit the resulting
file and don’t modify the first field, you can later import that file back
into Anki and Anki will update your notes based on your edits, provided you
import back into the same note type.

If you find yourself needing to edit the first field as well, you’ll need to
change the format of your note type so that the first field is an ID number
rather than actual text. (You can install the "Add note id" plugin to make
this easier.)

In order for formatting to be preserved when you import text back in, the text
is exported with all the HTML formatting embedded in it.

Exporting Packaged Decks

A packaged deck consists of cards, notes, note types and any sounds or
images bundled up into a file ending with .apkg. You can use packaged decks to
transfer cards between people, or for backing up parts of your collection. A
packaged deck is compressed, so it will be smaller than the sum of the files
in your profile folder.

There are two different kinds of packaged decks.

Collection Package

When you export all decks with scheduling included, this is called a
collection package. Anki will copy your entire collection into a file called
"collection.apkg", and place it on your desktop. A collection package is
used to back up your collection, or copy it to another device.

When this file is later imported, Anki will delete all the current cards in
the collection, and replace the collection with the items in the
collection.apkg file. This is useful for copying your collection back and
forth between devices.

Note

Existing media in your collection is not deleted when you import a
collection.apkg. To delete unused media, use Tools>Check Media.

Note

Anki’s automatic backups are also collection packages. Simply double
click on one to restore your collection to that backup.

Deck Package

Deck packages contain a single deck (and any child decks it may have). They
have a filename ending with .apkg, but a filename other than collection.apkg.
When you import a deck package, Anki will add the contents into your
collection, rather than overwriting your collection.

If some notes in the deck package have previously been imported, Anki will keep
the version with the most recent modification time. So if you download an
updated deck, the edits that have been made in the updated version will be made
in your collection as well, but if you re-import an unchanged deck after making
edits in your collection, the changes in your collection will be kept.

If you choose not to include scheduling information, Anki will assume that you
are sharing the deck with other people, and will remove marked and leech tags
so that they will have a clean copy of it.

Managing Files and Your Collection

Checking Your Collection

It’s a good idea to occasionally check your collection file for problems. You
can do this via the Tools>Check Database menu item. Checking the database
ensures the file is not corrupted, rebuilds some internal structures, and
optimizes the file.

When you check the database, your tag list is also rebuilt. When you delete
individual decks or cards, Anki does not update the list of used tags, as it’s
inefficient to do so. If you want to clear old tags out from the list that are
no longer in use, checking your database is the way to do it.

Please note that Anki will automatically optimize your collection once every 2
weeks. This optimization ensures the collection performs well, but it does not
check for errors or rebuild the tag list when automatically optimizing.

File Locations

On Windows, the latest Anki versions store your Anki files in your appdata
folder. You can access it by opening the file manager, and typing
%APPDATA%\Anki2 in the location field. Older versions of Anki stored
your Anki files in a folder called Anki in your Documents folder.

On Mac computers, recent Anki versions store all their files in the
~/Library/Application Support/Anki2 folder. The Library folder is hidden by
default, but can be revealed in Finder by holding down the option key while
clicking on the Go menu. If you’re on an older Anki version, your Anki files
will be in your Documents/Anki folder.

On Linux, recent Anki versions store your data in ~/.local/share/Anki2, or
$XDG_DATA_HOME/Anki2 if you have set a custom data path. Older versions of Anki
stored your files in ~/Documents/Anki or ~/Anki.

Within the Anki folder, the program-level and profile-level preferences are
stored in a file called prefs.db.

There is also a separate folder for each profile. The folder contains:

Your notes, decks, cards and so on in a file called collection.anki2

Your audio and images in a collection.media folder

A backups folder

Some system files

Warning

You should never copy or move your collection while Anki is open.
Doing so could cause your collection to become corrupted. Please don’t
move or modify the other files in the folder either.

Startup Options

If you have made a destructive change on one computer and have an undamaged
copy on another computer, you may wish to start Anki without syncing in order
to use the full sync option without first downloading the changes. Similarly,
if you are experiencing problems with Anki, you might want to (or might be
instructed to) disable add-ons temporarily to see if one might be causing the
problem. You can do both of these things by holding down the Shift key while
starting Anki.

It is possible to specify a custom folder location during startup. This is
an advanced feature that is primarily intended to be used with portable
installations, and we recommend you use the default location in most circumstances.

The syntax to specify an alternate folder is as follows:

anki -b /path/to/anki/folder

If you have multiple profiles, you can pass -p <name> to load a specific
profile.

To change the interface language, use -l <iso 639-1 language code>,
such as "-l ja" for Japanese.

If you always want to use a custom folder location, you can modify your
shortcut to Anki. On Windows, right-click on the shortcut, choose Properties,
select the Shortcut tab, and add "-b \path\to\data\folder" after the path to
the program, which should leave you with something like

"C:\Program Files\Anki\anki.exe" -b "C:\AnkiDataFolder"

You can also use this technique with the -l option to easily use Anki in
different languages.

Note

On Windows, you should use a backslash (\) not a forward slash (/).

On a Mac there is no easy way to alter the behaviour when clicking on the Anki
icon, but it is possibile to start Anki with a custom base folder from a terminal:

open /Applications/Anki.app --args -b ~/myankifolder

DropBox and File Syncing

We do not recommend you sync your Anki folder directly with a third-party
synchronization service, as it can lead to database corruption when files are
synced while in use.

If you wish to keep your collection in sync as well, it is strongly recommended
that you create a script that copies your files from your synced folder to a local
folder, launches Anki, and then copies the files back when Anki is closed. This
will ensure that the files are never synchronized while they are open.

Network Filesystems

We strongly recommend you have Anki store your files on a local hard disk, as
network filesystems can lead to database corruption. If a network filesystem
is your only option, regular use of Tools>Check Database to detect corruption
is recommended.

Running from a Flash Drive

On Windows, Anki can be installed on a USB / flash drive and run as a portable
application. The following example assumes your USB drive is drive G.

Copy the \Program Files\Anki folder to the flash drive, so you have a
folder like G:\Anki.

Create a text file called G:\anki.bat with the following text:

g:\anki\anki.exe -b g:\ankidata

If you would like to prevent the black command prompt window from remaining
open, you can instead use:

start /b g:\anki\anki.exe -b g:\ankidata

Double-clicking on anki.bat should start Anki with the user data stored in
G:\ankidata.

Note

The full path including drive letter is required - if you try using
\anki\anki.exe instead you will find syncing stops working.

Note

Media syncing with AnkiWeb may not work if your flash drive is formatted
as FAT32. Please format the drive as NTFS to ensure media syncs correctly.

Backups

Each time your collection is closed (when closing Anki, switching profiles, or
synchronizing your deck), Anki exports your collection into the backups
folder. By default Anki will store up to 30 backups; you can adjust this in
the preferences.

Automatic backups do not protect against disk or computer failure, and do not
extend to your media. To keep your collections safe, please consider making
manual backups too.

The easiest way to make a manual backup is to use the File>Export menu item
to export all decks with scheduling and media information included, which will
save your data to an .apkg/.colpkg file.

If you want to back up multiple profiles and your add-ons as well, you can
make a complete copy of your Anki folder. Please make sure you close
Anki first, as backups may be corrupt if run while Anki is open.

To restore from an automatic backup:

First create a copy of your backups folder, as each time you close Anki it
deletes the oldest backup, and if you’re trying different backup files you
could accidentally end up deleting the backup you need. To do this, locate
your Anki folder, and copy the entire folder
somewhere safe, like your desktop.

Open Anki and the profile you want to restore. If your profile is corrupt and
won’t open, you can rename the User 1/collection.anki2 file to something else
to tell Anki to recreate an empty collection when you next open the profile.

With the profile open, use File>Import and import a backup from the copy of
the backups folder you created on your desktop. In the file selection dialog,
you can set it to detail mode using one of the icons so that the modification
date is shown on each file - that will give you an idea of which backup you
need.

If the backup you imported was not old enough, try an older one until you
locate an appropriate one.

Anki also logs deleted notes to a text file called deleted.txt in your profile
folder. These notes are in a text format that can be read by File>Import,
though please note the import feature only supports a single note type at one
time, so if you have deleted notes from different note types, you’ll need to
split the file into separate files for each note type first.

Inaccessible Harddisk

If Anki can’t write to files in the Anki folder, a message will be
displayed on startup saying that Anki can’t write to the harddisk, and Anki
will close. If you’re unsure how to fix the permissions, please contact
someone near you who is knowledgable about computers and can help you out.

Permissions of Temp Folder

Anki uses the system’s temporary folder to store temporary data. If the
permissions of this folder have been changed from the default settings by a
rogue app or buggy antivirus app, Anki will not function properly.

If you’re on a Windows 7 machine, the general steps to fix the problem are
listed below. As this is somewhat complicated, please ask someone knowledgeable
about Windows if you are not sure.

Click on the start bar, and type in %temp% (including the percents), then
hit enter.

Go up one folder, and locate the temp folder. Right click on it, and choose
Properties.

In the security tab, click on Advanced.

Click on the Owner tab. If you’re not listed as the owner, click the button
to take ownership.

On the permissions tab, ensure that you have full control. On a default W7
install the control will actually be inherited from c:\users\your-username.

Corrupt Collections

Anki uses a file format that is robust against program and computer crashes,
but it’s still possible for your collection to become corrupt if the files are
modified while Anki is open, stored on a network drive, or corrupted by a bug.

When you run Tools>Check Database, you will receive a message if Anki detects
the file has been corrupted. The best way to recover from this is to restore
from the most recent automatic backup, but if your backup is too
old, then you can attempt to repair the corruption instead.

Open a terminal, change to the folder your collection is located in, and type:

sqlite3 collection.anki2 .dump > dump.txt

Open the resulting dump.txt file in a text editor, and look at the final line.
If it reads "rollback;", change it to "commit;"

Then run the following in a terminal:

cat dump.txt | sqlite3 temp.file

Make sure you use temp.file - do not put collection.anki2 on the right, or you
will blank out the file. When you’re done, proceed to the final step.

Windows

Copy the sqlite3.exe program and your deck to your desktop. Then go to
Start>Run and type in cmd.exe.

If you’re on a recent Windows, the command prompt may not start on your
desktop. If you don’t see desktop displayed in the command prompt, type
something like the following, replacing administrator with your login name.

cd C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop

Then type:

sqlite3 collection.anki2 .dump > dump.txt

Open the resulting dump.txt file in a text editor, and look at the final line.
If it reads "rollback;", change it to "commit;"

Then run the following in a terminal:

type dump.txt | sqlite3 temp.file

Make sure you use temp.file - do not put collection.anki2 on the right, or you
will blank out the file. When you’re done, proceed to the final step.

Final Step

Check that you didn’t get an error message, and that temp.file is not empty.
The procedure optimizes the collection in the process, so it’s normal for the
new file to be somewhat smaller than the old one.

When you’ve confirmed the file is not empty:

rename the original collection.anki2 file to something else

rename temp.file to collection.anki2

move collection.anki2 back into your collection folder, overwriting the old version

start Anki and go to Tools>Check Database to make sure the collection has been
successfully restored.

Graphs and Statistics

Card Info

You can display information about a card by clicking the Info button in the
toolbar while browsing. Most of the displayed information should be
self-explanatory. A few notes:

Position

Only shown when the card is new, it shows the order the card will appear in
relative to other new cards. The position can be changed in the browser.

Interval

The delay from one review to the next. Times are abbreviated; "0s, 1m, 3h, 4d,
5mo, 6y" refers to seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years
respectively.

Ease

The approximate amount the interval will grow when you answer a review card
with the "Good" button.

Statistics

The statistics window is accessed by clicking on the graphs icon in the top
right of the main window, or by pressing Shift+S. The statistics window will
show statistics from the currently selected deck and any subdecks. If you
click on "collection" on the bottom left, statistics will be shown for your
entire collection instead.

By default Anki will show you statistics for the previous month. You can change
this to a year scope or deck life scope at the bottom. (The "today" section at
the top is of course unaffected by this selection.)

Clicking on "Save Image" will save an image of the statistics to a file on your
desktop to make it easy to share your statistics with others.

Note

When you delete notes, their review history is maintained in Anki. It
will not be included when looking at statistics for a specific deck (as Anki
has no way of knowing which deck the deleted cards belonged to), but will be
included when you look at statistics for the whole collection.

Types of Cards

The stats window uses some terms that you may not be familiar with:

Mature

A mature card is one that has an interval of 21 days or greater.

Young

A young card is one that has an interval of less than 21 days, but is not in
learning.

Learn

A learning card is one that is still in learning mode (using whatever steps
may be defined in the deck’s options).

Relearn

A relearning card is a card that you have failed in review mode, thus
returning it to learning mode to be relearned.

Unseen

An unseen card is one that has been added to your collection but has not yet
entered learning mode. Unseen cards are sometimes referred to as "new"
cards, especially when they are in the "new" queue to be shown for the first
time.

Today

At the top of the statistics window is a brief list of textual statistics about
the reviews that you have completed today. A “review” in this context is one
answering of a card, so a card might count as multiple reviews if it needed to
be seen multiple times, and a learning card answered also counts as a “review.”
A couple of the stats whose meaning may not be immediately obvious:

Again count

This is the number of reviews that you have failed (i.e., pressed Again on).
The correct percentage listed afterwards is the number of cards you did not
fail divided by the total number of cards you studied.

Learn, Review, Relearn, Filtered

The number of reviews that were learning cards, review cards, relearning
cards, or studied in a filtered deck when not due.

The stats for the current day are not a good overall indicator of your learning
progress; everyone has bad days and good days, and seeing that you got a lower
percentage correct on a particular day should not be cause for concern. The
remainder of the stats, which take longer periods of time into account, will
give more useful information if you wish to try to change your study habits or
scheduling settings based on your performance.

The “today” statistics are unaffected by the time period selected at the bottom
of the window.

The Graphs

Forecast

This graph shows an estimated number of reviews that will be due on a given
day in the future if you learn no new cards and fail no cards. The bars and
the left axis show the number of cards due on each day if you study all cards
each day, while the line and the right axis show the number of cards due on
that day if you don’t study at all until then. Note that the forecast graph
does not count reviews that are currently overdue, so if you have a large
backlog, the overdue cards will not be displayed.

Review Count

This graph counts the number of card reviews you have done. The bars may
correspond to days, weeks, or months, depending on the time period you’ve
selected at the bottom of the screen. The differently colored blocks show how
many of the cards you answered on each day were mature, young,
relearning, or learning cards. There is also a separate group for cards
answered in a filtered/cram deck while they were not due. The line and the
right axis shows the cumulative total for each type of review as time
progresses across the graph (so at 0 days, it would display the number for the
entire time period displayed on the graph).

Review Time

This graph works exactly like Review Count, except that it deals with the
amount of time you spent on each card rather than the number of cards
answered.

Intervals

This graph displays the number of cards that have a given interval (the delay
between two reviews). The line and the right axis tell you what percentage of
your cards have an interval of less than or equal to the time below that
point. The time scope has a different effect on this graph than other graphs:
rather than changing which cards or period of studying is included, it limits
how far out the intervals are displayed to (so 14-month intervals are not
displayed at all on a 1-year graph).

Hourly Breakdown

This graph shows what percentage of total reviews you have passed (i.e., not
pressed Again on) during given hours. The larger, darker bars and left axis show
the success rate; the thinner, lighter bars and right axis show the number of
reviews you’ve made at that hour (so you know how significant the results
are).

Answer Buttons

This graph shows how many times you’ve chosen the Again, Hard, Good, or Easy
button while studying learning/new, young, and mature cards. Anki
also displays the percentage of correct reviews for each type of card.

Cards Types

This pie chart shows what percentage of your deck or collection consists of
mature, unseen, young/learn, and suspended cards. If you wish to calculate a
more precise percentage, the key shows the exact number of cards in each
section, and the total number of cards is displayed to the side.

Manual Analysis

If you’re interested in getting information from your statistics other than
what Anki provides, it is possible to access the data directly. Because of the
complexity involved, this is not something we can provide any support for.

One option is to write an add-on that adds another graph or more
details to the statistics window. There are several add-ons of this sort on
AnkiWeb already, which you can look at to get an idea of how it works.

A more powerful and more complex option is to extract the review log information
directly from Anki’s database and analyze it in an external program. Anki uses a
database format called SQLite. There are many tools available for working with
SQLite databases; one of the easiest to start with is called
SQLite Browser, which will allow you to look around
the database as well as export a CSV version of tables for import into another
program.

The most important table for statistics is the revlog table, which stores an
entry for each review that you conduct. The columns are as follows:

id

The time at which the review was conducted, as the number of milliseconds that
had passed since midnight UTC on January 1, 1970. (This is sometimes known as
Unix epoch time, especially when in straight seconds instead of
milliseconds.)

cid

The ID of the card that was reviewed. You can look up this value in the id
field of the cards table to get more information about the card, although
note that the card could have changed between when the revlog entry was
recorded and when you are looking it up. It is also the millisecond timestamp
of the card’s creation time.

usn

This column is used to keep track of the sync state of reviews and provides no
useful information for analysis.

ease

Which button you pressed at the end of the review (1 for Again, 4 for Easy).

ivl

The new interval that the card was pushed to after the review. Positive values
are in days; negative values are in seconds (for learning cards).

lastIvl

The interval the card had before the review. Cards introduced for the first time
have a last interval equal to the Again delay.

factor

The new ease factor of the card in permille (parts per thousand). If the ease
factor is 2500, the card’s interval will be multiplied by 2.5 the next time
you press Good.

time

The amount of time (in milliseconds) you spent on the question and
answer sides of the card before selecting an ease button.

type

This is 0 for learning cards, 1 for review cards, 2 for relearn cards, and 3
for "cram" cards (cards being studied in a filtered deck when they are not
due).

Media

Anki stores the sounds and images used in your notes in a folder next to the
collection. For more on the folder location, please see the file locations section. When you add media within Anki, either by using the
paperclip icon in the editor or by pasting it into a field, Anki
will copy it from its original location into the media folder. This makes it
easy to back up your collection’s media or move it to another computer.

You can use the Tools>Check Media menu option to scan your notes and media
folder. It will generate a report of files in the media folder that are not
used by any notes, and media referenced in notes but missing from your media
folder. It does not scan question or answer templates, which is why you can’t
place media references to fields in the template. If you need a static image or
sound on every card, name it with a leading _ (e.g., _dog.jpg) to tell Anki to
ignore it when checking for media. If you delete media using the unused media
check, Anki will move it into your operating system’s trash folder, so you can
recover if you accidentally delete media that shouldn’t have been deleted.

Anki uses a program called mplayer in order to support sounds and videos. A
wide variety of file formats are supported, but not all of these formats will
work on AnkiWeb and the mobile clients. MP3 audio and MP4 video seems to be
the most universally supported.

LaTeX support

LaTeX is a powerful typesetting system, which is ideal for entering
mathematical formulas, chemical formulas, musical notation and so on. Anki
provides some support for LaTeX, allowing you to enter LaTeX code in your
notes. When you review a card, Anki will call LaTeX and display the generated
image instead.

Installing and Assumed Knowledge

Anki’s LaTeX support is not turn-key: it is assumed that you know how to use
LaTeX already, and that you have it installed. If you have no experience with
LaTeX, please consult one of the many guides available on the internet. If you
are having trouble with markup, please ask on a LaTeX forum.

To install LaTeX, on Windows use MiKTeX; on OSX use MacTex, and on Linux use
your distro’s package manager. Dvipng must also be installed.

Note

On Windows, go to Settings in MikTek’s maintenance window, and make sure
"Install missing packages on the fly" is set to "No", not to "Ask me first".
If you continue to have difficulties, one user reported that running Anki as
an administrator until all the packages were fetched helped.

Note

On OSX, LaTeX has only been tested with MacTex and BasicTex. If you use
BasicTex, you need to install dvipng separately, with the following command:

sudo tlmgr update --self; sudo tlmgr install dvipng

The command may not be on the path, so you may need to provide the full path,
eg /usr/local/texlive/2014basic/bin/x86_64-darwin/tlmgr.

Note

If you are not using the above LaTeX packages, you will need to
use the "edit LaTeX" add-on to specify the full path to latex and dvipng.

LaTeX on Web/Mobile

When you review a card with LaTeX on it, Anki will generate an image for that
LaTeX and place the image in your collection’s media folder for future use.
The web & mobile clients will display these images if they already exist, but
can not generate the images on their own.

To avoid having to review all your cards at least once before you can study on
the other clients, Anki can generate the images in bulk for you. To generate
all the images, please go to Tools>Check Media. After that, syncing should
upload the generated media to AnkiWeb and the other clients.

Example

The most general way to input LaTeX content is to surround it with
[latex][/latex] tags. There’s a shortcut button for this documented in the
editor section.

Warning

[latex] tags must be used inside a field - placing them in the card template will cause problems.

For example, entering the following on the front of an Anki flashcard:

Firstly, follow the documentation of the package and MiKTeX/MacTex in order to
install the package. To check the package is working, you’ll want to put code
like the above into a .latex file and test you can compile it from the command
line. Once you’ve confirmed that the package is available and working, we can
integrate it with Anki.

To use the package with Anki, click "Add" in the main window, then click the
note type selection button. Click the "Manage" button, then select the note type
you plan to use and click "Options". The LaTeX header and footer are shown. The
header will look something like:

After that, you should be able to include lines like the following in your
Anki cards:

[latex]\ethene{H}{H$_3$C}{CH$_3$}{Br}[/latex]

LaTeX Conflicts

It’s not uncommon for {{ and }} to pop up in LaTeX code when writing
mathematical equations. To ensure that your LaTeX equations don’t conflict
with Anki’s field replacements, it’s possible to change the separator to
something else.

For example, if you have a template:

{{latex field}}

Changing it to the following will make it unlikely that the LaTeX will
conflict:

{{=<% %>=}}
<%latex field%>

While this most commonly occurs with LaTeX, the solution presented here will
work in any situation where you need to include {{ }} on cards, regardless of
whether LaTeX is used or not.

When using cloze deletions, you cannot change the double braces used to mark
cloze deletions; instead, you can put a space between any double closing braces
that do not indicate the end of the cloze, so

{{c1::[$]\frac{foo}{\frac{bar}{baz}}[/$] blah blah blah.}}

will not work, but

{{c1::[$]\frac{foo}{\frac{bar}{baz} }[/$] blah blah blah.}}

will (and LaTeX ignores spaces in math mode, so your equation will render the same).

Unsafe commands

Anki prohibits certain commands like \input or \def from being used on cards or
in templates, because allowing them could allow malicious shared decks to
damage your system. (To be on the safe side, these commands are prohibited even
in comments, so if you’re getting this error but don’t think you’ve used one,
please double-check any comments you have in your headers, templates, and
cards.) If you need to use these commands, please add them to a system package
and import that package as described in the previous section.

Miscellanea

Menu Shortcuts

On Windows/Linux you can hold down the alt key and press a highlighted letter
to activate a particular menu.

Debug Console

Sometimes you may be asked to use the debug console to change a setting or
check something. Unless asked to enter text in the "debug console", you will
probably not need this. Advanced users may like to read more about it in the
add-ons page, linked below.

When asked to enter text into the "debug console", please start Anki, and in the
main window, press

Ctrl+Shift+;

(the control key, shift key, and semi-colon key at the same time)

On a Mac, press

Command+Shift+;

(the command key, shift key, and semi-colon key at the same time)

On some non-English keyboards, you may need to press ":" or "+" instead of ";".

In the window that has popped up, please paste the text you were asked to
paste in the top section. When you’ve done so, please press Ctrl+Return
(Command+Return on a Mac), and some text should appear in the bottom section.
If you’ve been asked to paste the resulting output, please copy it from the
bottom area, and paste it back to the support person.

If you press Ctrl+Shift+Return instead of just Ctrl+Return, Anki will try to
print the result rather than doing what you asked it to. If you are getting
unexpected errors, please make sure you’re not holding down the Shift key.

Add-ons

Anki’s capabilities can be extended with add-ons. Add-ons can provide features
like extra support for specific languages, extra control over scheduling, and
so on.

To browse the list of available add-ons, select the Tools>Add-ons>Browse &
Install menu item. You can also use Tools>Add-ons to check which add-ons are
installed.

Some add-ons have options or customizations that are only accessible by
editing them. To edit an add-on, go to Tools>Add-ons>[add-on name]>Edit.
Please be careful when editing - special characters and whitespace is
important, so if you see something like:

line1
line2
line3

…and you accidentally change it to the following, Anki will throw an error
when it is restarted:

line1
line2
line3

Many add-on authors include their email address in the add-on, so if you need
to get in touch with the author, editing the add-on and looking at the top of
the file may help.

If you have downloaded an add-on that is not working properly, or if you
accidentally made a mistake when editing an add-on, you can use the "Delete"
option in the menu to remove it.

Contributing

Sharing Decks Publicly

To share decks with the general public, synchronize them with
AnkiWeb, then log into AnkiWeb and click on "Share" from the menu next to the
deck you wish to share.

If you shared a deck previously (including with previous versions of Anki),
you can update it by clicking "Share" as above. Please ensure the name of the
deck in your account exactly matches the name shown in the shared deck
listing, or you’ll end up creating a new shared deck rather than updating the
old one. Updating a shared deck will not reset the download counts or ratings.
You can delete a shared deck that you have uploaded using the Delete button on
the shared deck’s page.

When you update a shared deck, users who downloaded the deck previously will not
automatically receive updates. If they download the deck again and re-import it,
newly added material will be imported without altering their existing study
progress, provided neither you nor the user has altered the note type since the
first import.

Note

When updating a deck, AnkiWeb expects the deck to be at the same
location as before. If you shared a deck when it was called "Korean Verbs" for
example, and then renamed it to "Korean::Korean Verbs", resharing will not be
able to update the existing copy.

Sharing Decks Privately

If you’d like to share decks with a limited group of people (such as a study
group or class) rather than the general public, you can do so by sharing them
outside of AnkiWeb.

To share a deck privately, go to the File menu and choose Export. Select a
single deck (not "All Decks"), and turn off "include scheduling information".
This will produce an .apkg file which you can share with others.

You can share the .apkg file by emailing it to people, placing it on a website
or shared folder, or using a free file sharing service like Dropbox or Google
Drive and sending people a link.

Both the computer version and mobile clients make it easy to import from an
apkg file simply by clicking or tapping on it. AnkiWeb does not have the
ability to import apkg files however, so the recipients of your deck will need
to have the computer version or Anki on their mobile device.

When a user imports an .apkg file, cards that already exist in their collection
will be ignored and any new cards will be added. As long as they use the same
note type, modified cards will also be updated. To prevent data loss, cards
that have been deleted in the new apkg file will not be deleted in the user’s
collection, so if you need to delete cards from users' decks for whatever
reason, you will need to contact them about it.

Sharing Add-ons

Please see the add-on documentation above.

App Translations

Launchpad will guess which languages you can translate based on the country
you’re connecting from. If the language you want to translate to doesn’t
appear, sign up for a launchpad account, and in your profile, click the !
next to preferred languages to the language you want to translate.

There are some special markers in text that you need to be aware of, and
careful when translating:

A string like Cards: %d or Error: %s means that the %d/%s part will be
replaced with some other value. The characters must remain the same in the
translation, so a translation may look like カード: %d.

The same applies to text like %(a)d of %(b)d - it would be
translated like %(a)d von %(b)d. If you need to reverse A and B in your
language, that’s fine as long as the text remains the same.

Menu items have an & to indicate which character is the shortcut key, such
as &File. In languages that use roman text, you can place the & over
a different character such as &Datei; in other languages there may be a
different convention. Japanese for example includes the roman character
afterwards instead, like ファイル (&F)

Some strings have plural support, so that "0 cards", "1 card", "5 cards"
can be represented properly in your language. In these instances you’ll
need to enter the 2 or 3 different forms.

Sometimes it will not be clear what a string refers to, and you may want to
see the context. Below every string to be translated, you’ll see a line like
this:

Located in ../dtop/aqt/deckbrowser.py:299

If you strip off the first "../dtop" section, you’re left with something like
"aqt/deckbrowser.py:299". You can then visit https://github.com/dae/anki/,
locate the same filename, and click on it. The file will be displayed with
line numbers on the left, and by matching up the line numbers (they may differ
by a few lines sometimes), you may be able to get a better understanding of
what the string refers to.

If you see forms in the string like the above example, the strings will
generally be obvious. If you do need to understand the context however, things
are a little more complicated, as those files are automatically generated from
an interface description instead. Please go to
https://github.com/dae/anki/tree/master/designer and locate the same
filename and click on it. We can’t rely on line numbers in this case, so
please use the browser’s find option to find the string in the file. The lines
immediately surrounding the found text may give a clue as to its meaning.

If you find a string that you’re unsure how to translate, or would like to
start a discussion with fellow native speakers on the best way to translate
something, please feel free to start a thread in the Anki forums.

If the language already appears in Anki’s preferences screen, updates you make
will automatically be included in future Anki releases.

If the language is not currently visible in Anki’s preferences screen, please
post on our support site and request that the language you’ve translated be
added to the list.

Any translations that were made at least a few hours before a new Anki release
are automatically included in the next release. Entirely new languages need to
be added manually, so please contact us if that applies to your translation. If
you’d like to see your name in the About screen as a contributor, please drop
Damien a line.

If you’d like to try out your translations without waiting for a new release,
you can export a .mo file from the translation website. If you then move that
.mo file into Anki’s installation folder, overwriting an existing .mo file
with the same language code (in the locale folder), Anki will display the new
translations when it is next started.

Translating the Manual

If you’re a fairly technical user, you may want to translate the
source file of the
manual, and compile it yourself with asciidoc. You can also use that github
repo to keep track of changes to the manual in the future.

If that sounds complicated, an easier way is to visit this page and use
File>Save As to save the manual to disk. You can then import it into Microsoft
Word or similar software, and translate it that way.

When you’re happy with the translation, you can either put it up on your
website and I can link to it, or I can host the translated file on Anki’s
website (but if you’re planning to make frequent updates, the former is a
better choice). If you’d like, you can post it before you’re done and we can
link to it in the list of in-progress translations below.

Another option is to put your translation on a wiki, so that other users can
contribute to it. There are many sites such as Wikia that
will allow you to easily create your own wiki for free. (The English version
once used a wiki; we found that we got too many unhelpful contributions and had
to spend too much time correcting them, but your mileage may vary.)

The following translations are currently in progress:

Hungarian

Portuguese

If you would like to help with one of these translations, please contact us on
TenderApp and we will put you in touch with the user(s) currently working on
it.

Contributing Code

Before contributing, please see the README.contributing file in that repo.

Frequently Asked Questions

I haven’t studied for a while, and now the next due times are too big!

When you use Anki every day, each time a card is answered correctly, it gets a
bigger interval. Let’s assume that good about doubles the interval. Thus you
have a 5 day wait, then a 10 day wait, 20 days, 40 days, and so on.

When people return to their deck after weeks or months of no study, they’re
often surprised by the length intervals have grown to. This is because Anki
considers the actual time the card was unseen, not just the time it was
scheduled for. Thus if the card was scheduled for 5 days but you didn’t study
for a month, the next interval will be closer to 60 days than 10 days.

This is a good thing. If you have successfully remembered a card after a one
month wait, chances are you’ll remember it again after a longer wait, too. The
same principles which make SRS effective in normal use apply when you’re
studying after a delay, too. It also makes little sense to schedule a card for
10 days in the future if you were able to easily answer it after a whole
month’s wait - you’d be going backwards.

Resetting the deck is an even worse solution. When returning to a deck after a
long absence, you may have forgotten many of your cards, but chances are you
haven’t forgotten them all. Resetting the entire deck means you have to waste
time studying material you already know.

Now you may find overdue cards that you were able to recall, but not
comfortably, since they were not reviewed when they should have been. To
counter this, Anki treats the delay differently depending on your answer. If
you find a card easy, the last interval plus the full delay are added together,
and then used to calculate the next interval. When you answer good, only half
the delay is used. And when you answer hard, only a quarter of the delay is
used. So if a card was due in 5 days, and it’s answered 20 days late, the next
times you’d end up with are approximately:

Hard: (5 + 20/4) * 1.2 = 12 days

Good: (5 + 20/2) * 2.5 = 37.5 days

Easy: (5 + 20) * 3.25 = 81.25 days

(the factors will actually vary depending on your performance in the deck)

If you find a card hard, the next interval is quite conservative and is less
than the last wait (25 days). If you find it good, the next interval is only
about 50% higher. And easy increases the interval aggressively as usual.

So it is recommended that you study as normal when you return to Anki after a
period of absence. But if you absolutely must reset the deck, you can select
the cards to reset in the browser, and use Edit>Reschedule.

Can I do multiple-choice questions?

Multiple choice questions are a poor review tool for a number of reasons.
The reason they are commonly used in an academic setting is because they are
easy to mark, and they allow the person studying to demonstrate their ability
to recognize the correct answer even if they can’t produce it themselves.

Furthermore, good multiple choice questions have well chosen "distractors" -
answers that are similar to the correct answer. A computer can look for
similarly spelt words, but it is not capable of choosing good distractors for
more complicated topics.

If you are studying for a test and you have a sample test with a multiple
choice question like the following:

Q: What animal has a really long neck?
A: 1. A monkey. 2. A giraffe. 3. A donkey. 4. A snail.

Then that question should be rewritten in Anki as follows:

Q: What animal has a really long neck?
A: A giraffe.

Or you can add your own choices:

Q: What animal has a really long neck? (dog/cat/giraffe/penguin)
A: A giraffe.

Can I link cards together? Add dependencies? How should I handle synonyms?

Anki supports links between cards of a note, but not between unrelated cards.
Imagine are you studying Japanese and aiming to be able to both recognize and
reproduce the Japanese. You may enter the word "ookii", which means "big", and
tell Anki to generate two cards - ookii→big and big→ookii.

In the above situation Anki can space reviews of those two sibling cards out so
that they don’t appear one after the other (see sibling spacing in
the link at the top of this document).

Some people want to extend this link between arbitrary cards. They want to be
able to tell Anki "after showing me this card, show me that card", or "don’t
show me that card until I know this card well enough". This might sound like a
nice idea in theory, but in practice it is not practical.

For one, unlike the sibling card case above, you would have to define all the
relations yourself. Entering new notes into Anki would become a complicated
process, as you’d have to search through the rest of the deck and assign
relationships between the old and new material.

Secondly, remember that Anki is using an algorithm to determine when the
optimum time to show you material again is. Adding constraints to card display
that cause cards to display earlier or later than they were supposed to will
make the spaced repetition system less effective, leading to more work than
necessary, or forgotten cards.

The most effective way to use Anki is to make each note you see independent
from other notes. Instead of trying to join similar words together, you’ll be
better off if you can determine the differences between them. Synonyms are
rarely completely interchangeable - they tend to have nuances attached, and
it’s not unusual for a sentence to become strange if one synonym is replaced
with another.

Continuing with the Japanese example earlier, imagine you want to learn the
word "dekai", which also roughly translates to "big", but is a more colloquial
expression. If you still want to review in both directions, you might make the
English prompt of this word "big (more casual)". The further you progress in
your language studies though, the more of a burden it becomes to define the
differences between similar words, which is why cards asking you to produce a
particular word are best left to the early stage of your studies. With a
strong base vocabulary, moving towards recognition-based study makes more
sense, as we all have a much larger passive vocabulary than our active
vocabulary.

As for ensuring that difficult material is introduced after easier material, a
number of existing tools are available. New cards are by default introduced in
the order they are added to the deck, so as long as the learning materials or
sources of information you are using are adequately graded for your level,
material should appear in order of easiness.

Can I give my notes an arbitrary number of fields?

Notes are designed to represent closely related information, and to make it
easy to reorganize where that information appears on a card. In the context of
language learning, notes are useful for representing things like a
phrase-translation pair, a phrase-translation-reading triplet, and so
on. All of these relationships are 1:1 - a given phrase has only one reading,
and one translation. (1)

Because of their ability to tie related pieces of information together, some
people try to use notes to tie less closely related information in their deck
together. For example, if they come across two sentences with the word
"completely":

He was completely confused.

That was completely uncalled for.

Then they put those two sentences in the same note, under the rationale that
since they share a word, they are related. But what if the user comes across
another example sentence?

The book confused her.

That sentence shares the word "confused" with a previous sentence. So should
it be in the note for "confused"? Or the note for "completely"? Or both?

Unlike the phrase-translation pairs mentioned above, if you say sentences
are related if they share a word, then sentences have a many:many
relationship. That is, sentence A may be related to sentence B and C, sentence
B may be related to A and D, and so on. Because the relationships are complex
and overlapping, notes are not a good way to represent them.

There seem to be two main reasons people try to represent such relationships
in notes:

"Because it’s neater to keep all the information in one place". This may
seem to be the case, but in reality you really don’t save much. If you want
to see all example sentences that contain the word "completely" and each
sentence is in a different note, all you have to do is search for
"completely".

"Because I want Anki to separate reviews of cards that share the same
word". This is related to the previous FAQ question. Defining the links
between cards is time consuming, and if it were done automatically and
every card that shared a word were separated from other cards that shared a
word, it would be both computationally prohibitive, and would likely lead
to a situation where nothing could be shown because it was all related to
something else. Yes, it’s not ideal for two sentences containing the same
word to be shown right after each other, but if you add new cards in a
random order such a situation is unlikely, and the downsides of trying to
prevent such a situation aren’t worth it. And even if such a solution were
introduced, it wouldn’t stop you from encountering the words in the real
world.

(1) It is possible for different people to translate the same phrase in
different ways, and different dialects may read the same word differently,
but that is not relevant to the discussion.

Can I host my own AnkiWeb?

Sorry, AnkiWeb is only available as a hosted service.

Why is the Android version free when the iPhone version isn’t?

Working on Anki desktop, AnkiWeb and AnkiMobile is my full time job, and I
need some way of paying the bills. Since I make the desktop & web versions
available for free, I rely on sales of the iPhone app in order to finance
development.

AnkiDroid is written by a separate group of volunteers. Since they based it on
the free desktop version I make available (and rely on AnkiWeb in order to
synchronize decks), they decided to make it freely available as well.

What spaced repetition algorithm does Anki use?

Anki was originally based on the SuperMemo SM5 algorithm. However, Anki’s
default behaviour of revealing the next interval before answering a card
revealed some fundamental problems with the SM5 algorithm. The key difference
between SM2 and later revisions of the algorithm is this:

SM2 uses your performance on a card to determine the next time to schedule
that card

SM3+ use your performance on a card to determine the next time to schedule
that card, and similar cards

The latter approach promises to choose more accurate intervals by factoring in
not just a single card’s performance, but the performance as a group. If you
are very consistent in your studies and all cards are of a very similar
difficulty, this approach can work quite well. However, once inconsistencies
are introduced into the equation (cards of varying difficulty, not studying at
the same time every day), SM3+ is more prone to incorrect guesses at the next
interval - resulting in cards being scheduled too often or too far in the
future.

Furthermore, as SM3+ dynamically adjusts the "optimum factors" table, a
situation can often arise where answering "hard" on a card can result in a
longer interval than answering "easy" would give. The next times are hidden
from you in SuperMemo so the user is never aware of this.

After evaluating the alternatives, the Anki author decided that near-optimum
intervals yielded by an SM2 derivative are better than trying to obtain
optimum intervals at the risk of incorrect guesses. An SM2 approach is
predictable and intuitive to end users, whereas an SM3+ approach hides the
details from the user and requires users to trust the system (even when the
system may make mistakes in the scheduling).

Anki’s algorithm is based on SM2, but differs from it in some respects.

SM2 defines an initial interval of 1 day then 6 days. With Anki, you have
full control over the length of the initial learning steps. Anki
understands that it can be necessary to see a new card a number of times
before you’re able to memorize it, and those initial "failures" don’t mean
you need to be punished by being shown the failed card many times over
the course of a few days. Performance during the learning stage does not
reflect performance in the retaining stage.

Anki uses 4 choices for answering review cards, not 6. There is only one
fail choice, not 3. The reason for this is that failure comprises a small
amount of total reviews, and thus adjusting a card’s ease can be
sufficiently done by simply varying the positive answers.

Answering cards later than scheduled will be factored into the next
interval calculation, so you receive a boost to cards that you were late in
answering but still remembered.

Like SM2, Anki’s failure button resets the card interval by default. But
the user can choose to make the card take some steps back rather than being
reset completely. Also, you can elect to review failed mature cards on a
different day, instead of the same day.

Remembered easily not only increments the ease factor, but adds an extra
bonus to the current interval calculation. Thus, answering remembered
easily is a little more aggressive than the standard SM2 algorithm.

Successive failures while cards are in learning do not result in further
decreases to the card’s ease. A common complaint with the standard SM
algorithms is that repeated failings of a card cause the card to get stuck
in "low interval hell". In Anki, the initial acquisition process does not
influence a card’s ease.

You can also check out sched.py in Anki’s source code for the scheduling
code. Here is a summary (see the deck options section for the
options that are mentioned in italics).

If you press…

Again

The card is placed into relearning mode, the ease is decreased by 20
percentage points (that is, 20 is subtracted from the ease value, which is
in units of percentage points), and the current interval is multiplied by
the value of new interval (this interval will be used when the card exits
relearning mode).

Hard

The card’s ease is decreased by 15 percentage points and the current interval
is multiplied by 1.2.

Good

The current interval is multiplied by the current ease. The ease is unchanged.

Easy

The current interval is multiplied by the current ease times the easy bonus
and the ease is increased by 15 percentage points.

For Hard, Good, and Easy, the next interval is additionally multiplied by the
interval modifier. If the card is being reviewed late, additional days will
be added to the current interval, as described here.

There are a few limitations on the scheduling values that cards can take. Eases
will never be decreased below 130%; SuperMemo’s research has shown that eases
below 130% tend to result in cards becoming due more often than is useful and
annoying users. Intervals will never be increased beyond the value of maximum
interval. Finally, all new intervals (except Again) will always be at least
one day longer than the previous interval.

Note

After you select an ease button, Anki also applies a small amount of
random “fuzz” to prevent cards that were introduced at the same time and given
the same ratings from sticking together and always coming up for review on the
same day. This fuzz does not appear on the interval buttons, so if you’re
noticing a slight discrepancy between what you select and the intervals your
cards actually get, this is probably the cause.